Roy Lindauer

MiddlemanApp CMS Companion

2026-03-25T16:03:00-07:00

Heck yeah, I can slop out a tool for my blog in absolutely no time now. I’ve manifested a very simple CMS UI for my Middleman based static website. It’s a TypeScript+React companion app that uses TipTap markdown editor that I can run when I am in bloggy mode.

software on demand

2026-03-22T21:37:00-07:00

It’s kinda weird that I am now able to materialize software on demand.

structured events

2026-03-22T21:27:00-07:00

https://charity.wtf/2022/08/15/live-your-best-life-with-structured-events/ Live Your Best Life With Structured Events.

If your tool set no longer works for you, friend, it’s time to go all in. Maybe what you wanted was a faster horse, but it’s time for a car, and the sooner you turn in your oats for gas cans and a spare tire, the better.

In brief: if you aren’t rolling out a solution based on arbitrarily wide, structured raw events that are unique and ordered and trace-aware and without any aggregation at write time, you are going to regret it. (If you aren’t using OpenTelemetry, you are going to regret that, too.)

shared reality in ai

2026-03-04T14:40:00-08:00

https://sterlinghamilton.com/en/shared-reality/ Good article about how to think about and work with coding agents. Simply said, adopt a spec-driven, test-driven, pair-coding model with your agents and you will have far better results. Define the shared reality in which we, both humans and coding agents, operate. Much like developing the ubiquoutous language required under a domain-driven development model. Crucial for deep understanding.

teddy diary

2026-02-16T10:40:00-08:00

Well, I officially have 2 users on Teddy Diary – myself and my wife 😂. She excitedly asked if she could also use the app after I shared the weekly summaries and entry suggestion/prompt.

Burning Man

2026-02-12T17:59:00-08:00

We may be going home this year )‘(

Teddy Diary

2026-02-10T22:10:00-08:00

I was inspired by the consistent habit of Theodore Roosevelt to log his daily events in a pocket diary and so I have built, for myself, a simple Rails app to do just that. To offset the slight inconvenience a digital version has over simply carrying a notebook around (as I already often do), this version will gently nag me when I do not enter anything for the daily entry. Additionally I get a weekly summary outlining key events, missed opportunities, and some more gentle nudging around goals and actions, which are generated by a locally hosted LLM running on Ollama. I am calling it “Teddy Diary”.

The intention is not to reflect, or to vent. It is write facts only, to focus on the verbs (met, walked, wrote, read), and to track effort, not outcomes, just as Mr. Roosevelt himself did.

thinking about speaking

2026-02-10T17:46:00-08:00

Currently I exist in a strange place where I know a thing, but cannot explain said thing deeply and technically. Frustrating. Perhaps too much embodied cognition, not enough dialogue, not enough discourse.

The good news is that this a learnable skill. Something to practice.

I am reading too much about 19th century men who had a gift for speech. They were built different. I am built from passive consumption of soundbites and infotainment.

Anyway. Lots of thinking about, thinking, and a lot of thinking about speaking.

personal computers

2026-01-15T10:30:00-08:00

Personal computers have become too good and that is why there is a powerful effort by big tech to take that away.

Why own when you can rent? Why freedom when you can “walled garden”?

the web

2026-01-09T23:13:00-08:00

The Internet is awesome. It’s the web that sucks.

firekeeper

2026-01-09T11:04:00-08:00

The Firekeeper doing a little spin when you use certain emotes is the most adorable shit I have ever seen in any fromsoftware game. 10/10 darksouls 3 is the best game.

discourses 2.5.4-5

2026-01-01T12:23:00-08:00

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.
~ Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.4-5

post american internet

2026-01-01T10:33:00-08:00

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Cory Doctorow delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany.

The door is open a crack, the wind is blowing, the post-American internet is upon us: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

Fuck yeah let’s go!

obsidian and git

2025-12-31T09:52:00-08:00

https://rob.cogit8.org/posts/2025-03-25-obsidian-git-quick-setup-for-developers/

Some good instruction for setting up Obsidian to use Git.

Thinking About PHP Toolchain

2025-12-30T19:45:00-08:00

Juggling multiple runtimes for various projects has me thinking about how much dealing with PHP is a huge pain in the ass.

Why is that though? Maybe it’s not? Maybe it’s just me? I don’t know.

Why is the Ruby ecosystem so much more pleasant from the developer experience? Why is Go more pleasant? Why do they seem more developer friendly?

And I mean developer friendly as in the operational sense:

Easy to install
Easy to switch versions
Easy to reason about environments
Easy to reproduce across machines

Not:

Syntax Friendliness
Language ergonomics
Learning curve

PHP is very beginner-friendly as a language, but not as a toolchain.

Anyway, I think I can answer the question of why.

Ruby and Go assume the runtime belongs to the project.
PHP assumes the project belongs to the runtime.

From that lens all of the frustration I have with PHP become obvious that I am doing it wrong. I keep trying to manage PHP as if the runtime belongs to the project. The PHP ecosystem feels fragile and unsupported when trying to move responsibility from ops to dev because it is. It is still quite early in the evolution of PHP from an infrastructure based ops managed runtime into a developper managed part of the toolchain.

Some other thoughts:

Composer solved only half of the problem. It has made PHP feel modern without modernizing the runtime model. Dependencies are nicely handled though.
Docker is an excellent solution for PHP development because it restores PHP to its comfort zone as an ops managed infrastructure.

update

Thinking about how to support my team at $dayjob. We use Macs exclusively for development. We use Lando for the WordPress projects, which is docker based, so there is need to even have PHP installed on the host machine. For Laravel projects we use Docker Compose, again no reason to even have PHP available locally. Our build tooling can execute composer and other tools in the docker container. Could not be easier.

On my personal projects I write more Ruby and Go than I do PHP. I have been doing a lot more with PHP lately though and am running into the friction of installing different versions of PHP on baremetal. Mise-en-place (and similar tools) have made it so easy to manage and switch platforms on my projects that I have taken for granted how much complexity there is under the hood to make my dev life so easy.

more updates

So much <3 to all of the folk trying to make this work. Not an easy task. And a thankless one at that.

douglas adams reactions to technology

2025-12-29T18:57:00-08:00

Douglas Adams:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

solstice

2025-12-21T22:43:00-08:00

The darkest of nights passes and the sun is reborn.

no heroes

2025-12-19T10:40:00-08:00

There are no heroes.

That was a reaction I had to some news. Meditating on this phrase for just a moment I take the meaning to be: men are faliable and flawed and are not to be worshiped. We should look elsewhere for inspiration and guidance in our lives.

While we shouldn’t perform any hero worship to these flawed people, we should aspire towards the idealized hero myth. Those myths exist for a reason. We see the potential for greatness in ourselves.

We should aspire to be like Hercules.

rent seekers

2025-12-18T16:57:00-08:00

everyone wants a dollar, goddamn.

my favorite way to play soulslikes

2025-12-17T13:55:00-08:00

My favorite way to play a soulslike is to become hilariously over-leveled and steamroll through every boss.

firefox in 2025

2025-12-17T12:26:00-08:00

I’ve been using firefox for probably 20 years now and have not really questioned the choice. Now I am. The Mozilla news has me reflecting on my choice. See also is mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

What even is a “web browser” today?
What does AI powered mean for a “web browser”?
What sort of interface do I require to the internet?
Is a pi-hole enough in my home network to mitigate malicious ads and trackers?
If I opt to use a “more supported” browser such as Google Chrome (or Chromium I suppose) should I run it inside a VM, isolated from my main machine?
Should I run Firefox in a VM once it is “ai powered”?
Is Waterfox a good fork of Firefox?
Is this a battle I really want to fight?
If the internet is just tv and ads are paying the bills, does it really matter since I can choose to not engage with it at all?

The message I am receiving from reflecting on the state of, things, is that I no longer want to engage with the corporate web. It does not enrich me, or improve my life in any way, or bring me any joy. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Mozilla directing Firefox down a path that seems counter to what the kind of people that use Firefox actually want from a browser is a clear signal that I have no fucking idea what is going on XD Best to just, walk away, and focus on the things that actually bring me joy in this world.

You should never build a cms

2025-12-15T08:06:00-08:00

You Should Never Build a CMS, a response to Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets

“Man who owns company says you need their product and not the other guys product.”

Joking aside, the sanity blog post is pretty good. As is Lee Robs. And as a sales pitch of the Cursor product, Lee did a great job of migrating their site off Sanity. In true vibe coding fashion the green field project was pretty good. Let’s check in in 6 months and see how things are holding up. Considering that what Lee Rob at Cursor did when he “migrated cursor.com from a CMS to raw code and Markdown”, is he built a fucking CMS. Just one without any of the features that will inevevitably be requested of him as the site grows and he left behind at Sanity.

Sanity makes some good arguments for a CMS instead of a single file = single page model. Content publishing is usually not as simple as creating a new markdown file in your git repository. There may be approval workflows, legal and compliance considerations, internationalization and localization work. Actually managing your content in a way that is not relying entirely on grep such that you can find all references to a specific product, or are dealing with esoteric content siloing rules dictated by a search performance team.

Neither are bullet proof solutions to building a website. Depending on your scale, your goals, your audience, and so many other factors, you may ONLY need a flat file static site that is managed by your team of coders, or you may need a structured content storage to emit and generate web pages and content across a variety of devices and screens.

The curse of knowing how

2025-12-15T07:23:00-08:00

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything.

Like Camus’ Sisyphus, we are condemned to push the boulder of our own systems uphill—one fix, one refactor, one script at a time. But unlike the story of Sisyphus, the curse is not placed onto you by some god. We built the boulder ourselves. And we keep polishing it on the way up.

I want to quote the entire post. This may be the best thing I have read this year.

The author quotes Marcus Aurelius to frame an argument that this boulder we have created and are cursed to push uphill has a deeper emotional core.

You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Programming lures us into believing that we can control outside events. We self-soothe by building. We need the small victories that building a new tool or writing a script bestow. We refactor that tool we built, not because it is messy, but because our lives are messy. This technical work becomes emotional regulation.

Reflecting on the past and taking inventory of the projects started, tools rebuilt, systems tinkered with, and the times in which I did those things, the authors reality become my own reality. His truths become mine. The burnout he warns of is only a few steps behind me. I do use programming as emotional regulation. I too want to defy what is real. I want to assert control when things are out of control.

Nietzsche warned of gazing too long into the abyss. But he did not warn what happens when the abyss is a Makefile or a 30k line of code Typescript project.

lmao.

There is a light at the end. Recognition of the patterns is a good step to changing them. The author also calls for learning to let go as we are not responsible to fix all the things. I agree.

MacOS is a Unix

2025-12-06T09:00:00-08:00

I often forget that macos is a unix and that many of the underlying tools are just bsd tools. auto_master for example, to configure auto mounting various network shares and disks.

I also forget that i can use apropos to figure out where to learn about a tool and of course use the man pages.

so i guess, friendly reminder (to myself) that macos is a unix.

gem.coop

2025-11-22T09:00:00-08:00

Gem.coop is a new server for sourcing Ruby gems. It's easy to switch.

I switched because Ruby Central's actions left me feeling uncomfortable. Supporting the folk who are doing the work rather than, whatever Ruby Central does, feels better and better aligns with my values.

  -source "https://rubygems.org"
  +source "https://gem.coop"

We aim for fast, simple hosting, that is compatible with Bundler but optimized for the next generation. It’s built for the community by the former maintainers and operators of RubyGems.org.

Indieweb Website Updates

2025-11-15T09:10:00-08:00

A website is a garden to tend to, and the IndieWeb is a guide for how to grow a garden that yields higher quality. Or something like that. Anyway, lots of updates here.

Templates have been tidied up. The website structure has revealed itself to me and struturally I am quite happy with it.
Microformats have been added where appropriate.
Webmentions are now being fetched and displayed.
HTML comments have been added to the source code to help not only me remember what I am doing, but to help others who are learning how to build websites.
Tailwind CSS has been removed

There is now a page where I document some of the tools and processes I am developing to support my participation in the indieweb.

SEP

2025-11-15T09:00:00-08:00

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy A good resource to support reading and learning philosophy books. They can be a lot. The SEP is a translator for the language of philosophy, a resource that provides a trusted, academic-level overview of key terms, thinkers, and schools of thought.

Affinity

2025-10-31T10:00:00-07:00

The affinity news kinda sucks. On the surface it looks like a good deal but there is a lot of historical precedence that this is just another step on a path to full enshittification of the software suite. This is not a move that will benefit users long term. Then again, such is the cycle of software.

As Matthias Ott explains very well, design tools come and go. Affinity tools have been fucking awesome for me for years. And they will continue to work fine for a while. I will set my sights on other tools soon. Stay curious and have a beginners mind.

Ruby Central

2025-10-31T10:00:00-07:00

Ruby community is in a bit of a crisis. RubyCentral has performed a hostile takeover of RubyGems and Bundler. You can read a pretty non-biased accounting of what transpired here. I, however, am full of bias. I just do not trust RubyCentral. I love programming with Ruby. It’s a joy. Watching what transpired with RubyCentral, and learning more about some of the public faces of popular Ruby projects, has just turned me off.

The events have also widened my view of the community - hanami looks incredible, i have also been tinkering with roda. And to be real, I can just write ruby without participating in rails, rubycentral, shopify, etc. We don’t need them. I certainly don’t. I am very fortunate in that regard.

devops path

2025-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

DevOps is never a straight line. It's one rabbit hole after another. Log ingestion and tracing, turning all the knobs and dials and fiddly bits, digging into metrics, only to find three more things to learn.

Today's rabbit hole was digging into PHP app performance + Azure, and learning that I have a some things to learn in regards to OpenTelemetry + PHP instrumentation.

Tonight is continuing to learn Kubernetes to round out some Containerization study.

Continuous Learning really is continuous and I wouldnt have it any other way.

Application Error Logging in Docker

2025-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

When running non interactive applications in Docker such as a web server or a PHP application (or both!) traditional file-based logging can be real annoying to deal with. Logs written to files inside containers can be lost when containers restart. Those logs are also difficult to aggregate from multiple instances. Generally, a pain.

Many years ago I was managing PHP applications in docker and at that time it was necessary to manually configure logging in PHP-FPM to write to stderr. I have started building and supporting more PHP workloads lately and thankfully the community has mostly resolved the logging issues. I’ve made things more complicated for myself by carrying over configurations from years ago that are no longer necessary or just no longer helpful.

I hope you find this blog post helps you understand the relationship of logging from your application to docker and how docker treats/handles logging.

The short version of all of this is, write your application logs to stderr if you want to access them via docker logs and let your docker logging driver handle them, otherwise they will be lost forever inside your container.

Docker logging.

The docs for docker logging are pretty good. To summarize - docker logs show the commands output just as it would appear if you ran the command interactively in a terminal. Command here means the command your container executes. Linux commands typically open three I/O streams when they run called stdin, stdout, and stderr.

stdout is usually a command’s normal output
stderr is typically used to output error messages.

docker logs shows the commands stdout and stderr.

Something important to know is that docker supports different logging drivers letting you control where to send logs. By default docker uses the json-file driver, which stores the logs in a json file to the hosts file system. Anyway, just know that if your docker configuration deviates from default then docker logs may not show you anything.

Nginx.

If you look at the official nginx docker image on docker hub you will see that it symlinks the access and error log paths to /dev/stdout and /dev/stderr respectively.

RUN set -x \
  # a bunch of setup and then...
  # forward request and error logs to docker log collector
    && ln -sf /dev/stdout /var/log/nginx/access.log \
    && ln -sf /dev/stderr /var/log/nginx/error.log \

If you install nginx in your container and are not using the official image you will want to ensure you do this yourself. For example:

FROM php:8.4-fpm-alpine

RUN apk add --no-cache nginx

RUN ln -sf /dev/stdout /var/log/nginx/access.log \
    && ln -sf /dev/stderr /var/log/nginx/error.log

PHP & PHP-FPM.

The official PHP container correctly sets the PHP-FPM configuration error_log to /proc/self/fd/2 so you will get errors directly to stderr.

If you have display_errors = On (the default in development), errors are sent to the HTTP response. You should set display_errors = Off and ensure log_errors = On so errors go to your error_log (stderr) instead of being shown to users.

If you need to customize PHP settings, create a custom php.ini and ensure logging is configured:

config/php.ini

log_errors = On
display_errors = Off
error_log = /proc/self/fd/2

Copy it into your Dockerfile:

COPY config/php.ini /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/custom.ini

Why does PHP use /proc/self/fd/2 and not /dev/stderr? I am not sure exactly. I recall that earlier versions of PHP may have issues with /dev/stderr. It may be something internal to PHP-FPM. If you have the answer I would love to know!

Let’s chat about this /proc path for a brief second.

/proc is a pseudo-filesystem (procfs) in Linux that provides an interface to kernel data structures and process information. It’s not a real filesystem on disk. -/proc/self is a symbolic link that always points to the /proc/[pid] directory of the currently executing process. This is convenient because you don’t need to know the process ID.
/proc/self/fd/ is a directory containing symbolic links to all file descriptors opened by the current process.
/proc/self/fd/2 is a symbolic link to wherever file descriptor 2 (standard error/stderr) points for that process.

Basically, that path lets us write to the stderr I/O device that Linux created when the PHP-FPM process was started. Pretty handy!

Links 4

2025-10-24T09:35:00-07:00

https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/ Excellent review of Omarchy. I admit I was falling for the hype but after running it for a few days I just, didn't care for it. This article breaks it down and explains all of the little ways that Omarchy is just not that good. The lesson here is to just install Arch Linux and all the tools you need. Also, wow I love this website! https://マリウス.com/.

Intro Post

2025-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

My preferred medium is mixed media, mostly pen & ink and markers. I am an expressionist. I create dynamic, and reflective work. My artist statement is: Creation is all that matters, and if the output of that creation reflects the process or tells the story then it is a beautiful reward.

I am not a classically trained artist. Though I admire the great draftsman and master painters. My roots are in graffiti, graphic design, pop art, comic books, and other forms of popular culture. I have been a fan of the work of Basquiat, Banksy, Keith Haring, and other street artists. For many years I have neglected my own art, rejecting my work and my own voice. Now I am trying to reclaim it. I am who I am, and my art is a reflection of that, as it should be. There is no grand statement of purpose, or deep insight into the human condition, just me trying to understand my own mind and my place in the world.

Okay nevermind I have some more thoughts about this. The conflict between creating for the sake of creating, because it is what humans do, and creating to feed the slop machine and the algorithms to get digital hugs and validation, is fascinating and frustrating. Worst is how humans are outsourcing the act of creation to AI which reduces art to a commodity, a product, a thing to be sold, traded, and consumed. It’s a shame. Making music, art, poetry, dancing, all are things we should be doing. We cannot be consumers and passive participants to life.

containers

2025-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

I love containers because they don’t just change how I build, they change how teams ship. Reliability at every stage, fewer blockers, more focus on the work that matters. Containerization is not just tech for me. It is trust. It is speed. It is peace of mind.

I literally couldn't imagine _not_ using containers at this point.

Links 3

2025-05-02T09:35:00-07:00

https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/ An incredible dive into why you don't need, or really don't want, React for your next web project. I agree with mostly everything here. What's stood out is that we offload too much to user machines, and in fact, put too much emphasis on the developer experience and organizational baggage than on real user needs. Also, use hotwire or htmx.

https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/terminal Joplin is a neat note-taking app. Also does "todos". Has a CLI which is pretty useful if you spend a lot of time on the command line. I've started tinkering with the tool and it's neat. I think if you version control the data this becomes even more useful.

https://norsemythologist.com/ Pretty fun site I found when watching American Gods and looking up why Wednesday was named such. I knew that Thursday was "Thor's Day," but did not know Wednesday is Odin's Day. Tuesday is for Tyr. Sunday and Monday are named for the Sun and the Moon. Friday is Odins wife Frigg. Interesting stuff, especially as I am slowly digging into Anglo-Saxon paganism, which shares some roots in Norse as well.

https://thetruesize.com Want to know how big our world's land masses really are? Fun site giving you the real scale of the world's countries in comparison to each other.

https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/ They are hosting their site on a Nintendo Wii. I love it. So fun!

https://modernagejournal.com/notes-toward-the-definition-of-kitsch/249336/ I have been learning about kitsch, what makes art kitsch, what makes art "art," and how all of this craft evolves. What was avant-garde in the past could be kitsch today. Or hell, even just taking someone's real "art" and mass-reproducing it beyond reason can dilute the work so much it falls into kitsch. The Mona Lisa, for example. It's like right on the edge and it's just now a de facto avatar of "art" without meaning.

Notes 2

2025-03-23T12:57:00-07:00

I started reading the Anxious Generation today and it is fascinating! Like, you just _know_ that phones are a problem, it's obvious, but what I realize now is less obvious is just _how_ they are a problem. To sum it up as I understand it so far; social media has been engineering to bypass crucial and important learning paths for youth during the most sensitive and important points in their development as members of society.

Spring is here! Backyard is setup. I will now live outside until November. Our poor apricot tree has blossomed, it survives another year. Hoping we get some fruit :)

Severance season 2 finale was meh. I'm bored by vibes shows and intentionally vague dialog. Season 2 had some good moments but after 3 years, I really wanted something more. I had expectations and it did not live up to them. That's on me.

I spent most of March sick. Literally 3 weeks just feel like they disappeared. It's been disorienting coming back; I celebrated a birthday, the time changed, and now it's spring. All of that is a blur.

I am learning how to incorporate AI into my day to day in more meaningful and impactful ways. Next up is to work with MCP servers to fine tune. It's all very fun. At the same time I want to find more ways to avoid touching computer. Hard to do when everything is computer.

Links 2

2025-03-16T09:14:00-07:00

https://phptherightway.com/ Doing more PHP these days. So I am catching up on better practices and modern php. I thought this site was a very helpful resource.

https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#introduction Learn to write clear, idiomatic Go.

https://gorails.com/ Learn Ruby on Rails. Gorails is amazing. Chris Oliver is a beast.

https://boringrails.com/ Solutions to everyday boring problems in web development to keep you productive.

https://hybrd.co/posts/adding-meta-tags-to-a-rails-cms-with-polymorphism Solid model for adding seo meta to your rails cms.

https://anthonydmays.com/blog/2022/05/09/how-to-practice-leetcode-problems-the-right-way/ I've been practing leetcode to support and strengthen my understanding of data structures and algorithms. This article does a great job of helping you with how to think about and actually practice leetcode.

https://manifesto.getglu.dev/ Loved this CI/CD manifesto. I was taught to think about the devops and CI/CD pipeline the same way, and so learned to build them this way. Glad I did. The gist is to write them to be developer friendly and to be debuggable. The way I do that is with Ruby, because of how easy it is to create a DSL with Ruby. Also Rake is a great interface for things like pipeline code.

https://pippinbarr.com/it-is-as-if-you-were-on-your-phone/info/

Really funny site that simulates what it is like to just be on your phone.

Look at you! On your phone! But you've got a secret! And you won't tell! You're not on your phone! It is only as if you were on your phone! You're just pretending to be on your phone! On your phone!

Links 1

2025-02-18T11:26:00-08:00

https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rgb-hsl Pretty cool new way to handle color in CSS. The gist as I understand it is it will give more reasonable and expected results as you lighten and darken a color. Additionally, it's an expanded color space (P3 color?) which means, if your monitor supports it, we can use more colors. Neat.

https://www.cosive.com/blog/my-washing-machine-refreshed-my-thinking-on-software-effort-estimation So often in my own job I am asked to estimate effort of something similar to what we have built before. And I get so much push back about how "easy" something should be. But we often fail to account for the unknowns, and fail to explain clearly that the 10% difference is the difference between a 1 day task and a 2 week task. This article does a great job of explaining that.

https://hybrd.co/posts/adding-meta-tags-to-a-rails-cms-with-polymorphism Great way to include meta tags in a Rails app. I've done this in a very similar way, but this article does a great job of explaining the why and how.

https://indieweb.org/ The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the "corporate web". Build your own website, control your own data, post to your own site. Syndicate to the wider web. It's pretty neat, I am starting to tinker and integrate into my own site.

Notes 1

2025-02-17T07:19:00-08:00

I finished reading a Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms. Really glad I read it. It filled many gaps I had on some fundamentals, like _how_ big notation works and why we do it and why and when we use certain data structures.

Also finished reading Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Incredible book. Reflecting on myself while reading and seeing just how much my ego has been in my way for most of my life, was not easy. But I am so glad I did.

Got a new workstation setup, a System76 Thelio Spark Premium (with sick pink racing stripe lol), to be my new home for deep work this year. It was a "grand gesture", a way to encourage and support myself while I do the deep work. It's going well so far!

Building this blog has been a lot of fun. Glad I moved away from micro.blog, not that their service is bad in any way, quite the opposite, I just really value building my own thing. It's very fun and rewarding.

I built a companion service for static websites. Currently, it scans new posts for urls to submit as webmentions, provides a commenting API, and provides an imageproxy service to do on demand image resizing and caching. In the future it will be a webmention provider, and syndicate posts to places like Bluesky, Mastodon, and maybe LinkedIn. I will probably write a full blog post about it.

Table-driven tests

2025-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

While studying up on some data structure and algorithm fundamentals, I learned of a novel approach to writing tests for my code. Table driven tests are a method of writing unit tests where multiple cases are defined in a structured format. Testing framework not required.

If I were to use this code in a real project I would extract the tests into a separate file and use a testing framework. But for now, while tinkering and learning, this is a great way to test code.

I believe this qualifies as table-driven testing. Running the same set of tests with different inputs and expected outputs, organized in a table-like structure.

eg:

$ ruby recursive-algorithms.rb
"#quicksort! | [0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6] = [0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6] | true"
"#quickselect! | 10 = 10 | true"
"#greatest_product_of_three_numbers | 90000 = 90000 | true"
"#find_missing_number | 3 = 3 | true"
"#find_missing_number | 8 = 8 | true"

My ruby file recursive-algorithms.rb:

# Quicksort.

class SortableArray
  attr_reader :array

  def initialize(array)
    @array = array
  end

  def partition!(left_pointer, right_pointer)
    pivot_index = right_pointer
    pivot = @array[pivot_index]
    right_pointer -= 1

    while true
      while @array[left_pointer] < pivot do
        left_pointer += 1
      end

      while @array[right_pointer] > pivot do
        right_pointer -= 1
      end

      if left_pointer >= right_pointer
        break
      else
        @array[left_pointer], @array[right_pointer] = @array[right_pointer], @array[left_pointer]
        left_pointer += 1
      end
    end
    @array[left_pointer], @array[pivot_index] = @array[pivot_index], @array[left_pointer]
    return left_pointer
  end

  def quicksort!(left_index, right_index)
    if right_index - left_index <= 0
      return
    end

    pivot_index = partition!(left_index, right_index)
    quicksort!(left_index, pivot_index - 1)
    quicksort!(pivot_index + 1, right_index)
  end

  def quickselect!(kth_lowest_value, left_index, right_index)
    if right_index - left_index <= 0
      return @array[left_index]
    end

    pivot_index = partition!(left_index, right_index)

    if kth_lowest_value < pivot_index
      quickselect!(kth_lowest_value, left_index, pivot_index - 1)
    elsif kth_lowest_value > pivot_index
      quickselect!(kth_lowest_value, pivot_index + 1, right_index)
    else
      return @array[pivot_index]
    end
  end
end

def greatest_product_of_three_numbers(array)
  sa = SortableArray.new(array)
  sa.quicksort! 0, array.length - 1
  return sa.array[-3] * sa.array[-2] * sa.array[-1]
end

def find_missing_number(array)
  sa = SortableArray.new(array)
  sa.quicksort! 0, array.length - 1
  sa.array.each_with_index do |value, i|
    if i != value
      return i
    end
  end
end

# TESTS

[
  [[0, 5, 2, 1, 6, 3], [0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6]]
].each do |test, expected|
  sa = SortableArray.new(test)
  sa.quicksort! 0, test.length - 1
  pp "#quicksort! | #{sa.array} = #{expected} | #{sa.array == expected}"
end

[
  [[0, 50, 20, 10, 60, 30], 10]
].each do |test, expected|
  sa = SortableArray.new(test)
  ret = sa.quickselect! 1, 0, test.length - 1
  pp "#quickselect! | #{ret} = #{expected} | #{ret == expected}"
end

[
  [[0, 50, 20, 10, 60, 30], 90000]
].each do |test, expected|
  ret = greatest_product_of_three_numbers(test)
  pp "#greatest_product_of_three_numbers | #{ret} = #{expected} | #{ret == expected}"
end

[
  [[5, 2, 4, 1, 0], 3],
  [[9, 3, 2, 5, 6, 7, 1, 0, 4], 8]
].each do |test, expected|
  ret = find_missing_number(test)
  pp "#find_missing_number | #{ret} = #{expected} | #{ret == expected}"
end