If I had to pick one engineering team to write up how they make (and keep) Rails running fast, it’d be Shopify’s. What a treat! Part of Shopify’s success with Ruby on Rails is an emphasis on writing fast code. But, how do you really write fast code? Largely, that’s context sensitive to the problem you’re trying to solve. Let’s talk about a few ways to start writing faster code in Active Record, Rails, and Ruby.

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Muon is a lightweight alternative to Electron written in Golang in about ~300 LoC, using Ultralight instead of Chromium. Ultralight is a cross-platform WebKit rewrite using the GPU to target embeded desktop applications that resulted in a fast, lightweight, and low-memory HTML UI solution that blends the power of Chromium with the small footprint of Native UI. Between this, NodeGui, and Catalina’s support for React Native, Electron is getting squeezed on all sides.

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n8n (a numeronym for “nodemation”) is a node-based workflow automation tool. The reason for the square quotes around “open source” is because it has a Commons Clause attached to its Apache 2.0 license, which means you can do anything you want with the source code except make money with it. Since n8n itself is built on open source tech such as TypeScript and Vue.js, this is a nice touch by the author in the FAQ: As n8n itself depends on and uses a lot of other Open Source projects it is only fair and in our interest to also help them. So it is planed to contribute a certain percentage of revenue/profit every month to these projects. How much exactly is not decided yet.

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Have you ever created a Kubernetes cluster and wondered what type of worker nodes you should use? For example, if you’re on AWS, should you use many small and cheap t2.micro instances, or some few powerful m5.xlarge instances? This article discusses the pros and cons of using different worker node sizes in your cluster.

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Did you know QWERTY was created in 1878?! I didn’t until I read this interesting piece by Yaron Wittenstein about how he found a new keyboard layout called Colemak that is much less RSI-inducing than QWERTY. QWERTY typing never felt elegant for me. If always felt like something just isn’t right. Typing is supposed to be fun, and with Colemak it’s much more fun. The motivation wasn’t to type faster than QWERTY but to make typing more fun and less effortless.

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With Hydra, you can compose your configuration dynamically, enabling you to easily get the perfect configuration for each run. You can override everything from the command line, which makes experimentation fast, and removes the need to maintain multiple similar configuration files.

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Tyler Hall: I completely realize and wholeheartedly own-up to the fact that I’m a geek and a Mac power user above and beyond what normal muggles will ever experience, nonetheless, this is the first-run experience I was greeted to this afternoon after upgrading to Catalina. I’m sure Catalina will be worth it in the end, but I’m going to sit this one out for a bit until the dust settles.

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There’s probably nothing life-changing in here for those of us deep in the open source world, but I thought this was worth sharing just in case someone in your life could use a primer on what open source is all about and how to get involved. Have you ever wondered how the open source world exists thanks to the contribution of thousands of people all over the world? Is there a way to learn the skills to contribute at maximum, or to improve it?

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Turns out one of our asset caching best practices (content hashes in filenames + far-future expiry) has a serious flaws in it: In practice, changes to one of your source files almost always invalidates more than one of your output files—and this happens because you’ve added revision hashes to your filenames. Philip goes on to explain why this happens and then proposes 3 possible solutions. Good stuff 👌

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Liran Tal: I wrote this tiny module thing that allows you to quickly check if a website is running vulnerable JS libs straight from the terminal. You’d be surprised how many websites are still running old and vulnerable versions of jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular and others. Use it responsibly ;-)

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Want to hear two of the top leaders in open source talk about their differing philosophies on open source and the modern web? The other week I ended up going back and forth in tweets with David Heinemeier Hansson, it wasn’t going anywhere but he graciously invited me to their podcast and we were able to expand the discussion in a way I found really refreshing and mind-opening. DHH and I have philosophies around work and open source that I believe overlap 95% or more, so… Here’s the Twitter conversation that started this debate on the Rework podcast.

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Colin Lecher reporting for The Verge: Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 730, which makes it a crime to distribute audio or video that gives a false, damaging impression of a politician’s words or actions. While the word “deepfake” doesn’t appear in the legislation, the bill clearly takes aim at doctored works. Lawmakers have raised concerns recently that distorted deepfake videos, like a slowed video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that appeared over the summer, could be used to influence elections in the future. This is the first (but likely not the last) piece of legislation aimed at fighting the potential impact of GANs Gone Wild. It’ll be interesting to watch this game play out. I think the only long-term, sustainable solution will emerge from the same arena where the problem began: technological advances.

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