Fascination Street

Writing for the week of March 24, 2025

We’re in the final stages of a large system migration this week at work. In fact, we’re migrating multiple systems into one. Not an easy task but we should be able to iterate much faster going forward. Also had to deal with a legacy system going down. That was fun to triage as the sole engineer with any knowledge of the system. TL;DR CI/CD, ECR, secrets manager. It was a long week, which is my excuse for not posting this on Friday.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve started a new Rails 8 app and used the generator to scaffold out the authentication rather than use Devise. I think generators are an often overlooked value in the Rails world. While at Blue Lava, I noticed we were repeating a pattern when implementing event sourcing in our monolith. I spent some time and wrote a generator to scaffold out the repeated parts. It was similar to generating a model. It created the event and left the author to fill in the payload. There were some accompanying bits. It sped things up considerably.

While working on that and learning about generators I started having a lot of ideas on how I could speed up the repeatable parts of the Rails app I work on. There is a lot of opportunity here.

The app that I have started is going to use Joe’s Bridge Components. I’ll be spending some time considering if a generator to add them couldn’t be used. More on the app later. I have a number of Apple eco-system things to learn and work through. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s been long overdue.

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Links

• https://emschwartz.me/building-a-fast-website-with-the-mash-stack-in-rust/ - reading about the MASH stack in Rust. At work, we are using WebAssembly for the frontend. I’m interested in comparing other Rust options for frontend work and this article mentions a number of them. We’re using a framework with an html macro making the comparisons pretty straight forward.
• https://medium.com/@lordmoma/ok-rust-you-really-have-a-readability-problem-e379df7df8df - I laughed at “Lifetimes are Rust’s way of ensuring memory safety, but they also have a special talent for making me question my career choices.”.
• https://benn.substack.com/p/live-like-youre-dying - I like Benn’s writing style. As a manager, I’ve had to remind people that we weren’t solving life or death problems. The following resonated: “Nor are startup employees under uniquely extreme stress; medical residents are making life-or-death decisions, not the people running a nascent software business that sells productivity tools to other nascent software businesses”

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Music

• https://consequence.net/2025/01/dead-kennedys-spring-2025-tour-h-r-bad-brains/ - DKs with HR!
• https://music.apple.com/us/album/spiral-in-a-straight-line/1756575884 - Touch Amore’s most recent is good. I’ve been enjoying it this week.
• https://music.apple.com/us/album/heavy-jelly/1740368318 - used to be called Slaves, now Soft Play, make some varied punk sounds. Some fun tracks on this album.

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.