josh-works

josh's ongoing dev notes

current PR associated with this work: Help the tests go quickly by channeling Vladimir Dementyev #33792

first PR associated with this work: @mastodon, Help the test harness run more speedily #29992

Public version of this file you're reading right now

Thursday, April 18, 2024

josh-works

Utter this to anyone I've ever worked with:

Josh sometimes writes a lot/too much even. True or false?

They'll laugh. This is a normal amount of written output for my style. Anyway, here's my 'dev notes' for openstreetmap-website/pull/4708: Reduce test run time

---

• link to public version of this document
• link to associated PR for OpenStreetMap

josh-works

Thesis: Housing can be affordable to the purchaser and profitable to the developer. For example, a finished studio apartment could be available at $700/mo, or a three-bed at $1300/mo, and the developer who builds it will consider the ROI on the project/investment to be exceptional.

The need to do something tends to trump the need to understand what needs to be done. And without data, anyone who does anything is free to claim success.

• Angus Deaton, The Great Escape

Housing, broadly, is often considered a political issue, to be fixed by politicians.

I'll be quoating broadly from a recent seminal book by Urban Economist Alain Bertaud, specifically from Chapter 6: Affordability (p 219).

josh-works

I often write detailed walk-throughs of difficult learning projects I take on.

This document serves as the same, a bit of an active scratch pad, and a way to quickly ask detailed questions of my team, and perhaps provide detailed answers for my team.

Useful links

• Flow School Syllabus

1. I am not on a leaderboard, but I want to be

josh-works

currently trying: USB-C->DisplayPort cord with SwitchResX to "force" the display up to a reasonable level

My home office setup has suffered some problems of late that are driving me insane.

The most annoying is my wired mouse. I use a wired Redragon Mammoth hooked up to my USB-C hub, and it started giving me problems when dragging anything. Like... a file, a screenshot, a window, it would rapidly (dozens of times a second) "drop" what I was dragging and then pick it up again.

This had extremely unpredictable effects, and was highly disruptive to my workflow.

I don't think my mouse is failing (my bluetooth mouse works fine, and for a variety of reasons I think the problem is my monitor is running at 30hz, not 60. more on that later.)

josh-works

"Process" is greater than everything

Having a good process is how you go about doing anything that takes a long time and is hard. A good process can be a faithful tool to help you learn dozens of things, now, and five years from now. It's flexible and it's powerful.

One of the biggest pieces of "having a good process" is "taking plentiful notes, easily and quickly"

---

I won't try to convince you. Here's Arique, currently in Mod 1, on how she's made use of this general process:

josh-works

class Object
  def exceptional?
    false
  end
end

Course = Struct.new(:name, :duration) do  
  def duration=(new_duration)
    self[:duration] = Duration(new_duration)
  end

josh-works

Double inject. What does it mean?

i want to know how long it takes to do some stuff. I've got some code like this:

def count_stuff(list)
  list.inject([]) do |results, item|
    results << get_results_from_something_else(values)
  end.flatten.uniq

josh-works

I needed a URL validator - it needed to check that URL's had HTTP or HTTPS at the beginning. I initially wrote a "before save" action, but didn't like it cluttering up my model. I found a reference to basically "monkey patching" Rail's default Validator class, so that's what I did!

# concerns/url_validator.rb
require 'uri'

class UrlValidator < ActiveModel::Validator

  def validate(record)
    if record.url?

josh-works

On Learning

topics: {
      DEEP WORK:
        protect and cultivate (limited) attention,
        ear plugs,
        skeptical of music,
        examine your own process,
 downtime,