This is a personal essay (I speak for me and my views, not for my employer) about what exactly a “Sustaining Engineering Model” is, in the context of the recent Heroku announcement, and the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” as seen by someone who has worked at the company for the past 14 years.
Now that programmers are at war with the robots (Gen AI) for our jobs, we need to lean into the things that they cannot do. Today, I’m going to be talking about how to be a human and communicate with other humans in the most hostile of scenarios, “in conflict (drama).”
I recently discovered that adding a clippy.toml file to the root of a Rust project gives the ability to disallow a method or a type when running cargo clippy. This has been really useful. I want to share two quick ways that I’ve used it: Enhancing std::fs calls via fs_err and protecting CWD threadsafety in tests.
Puma 7 is here, and that means your Ruby app is now keep-alive ready. This bug, which existed in Puma for years, caused one out of every 10 requests to take 10x longer by unfairly “cutting in line.” In this post, I’ll cover how web servers work, what caused this bad behavior in Puma, and how it was fixed in Puma 7; specifically an architectural change recommended by MSP-Greg that was needed to address the issue.
Before the latest improvements to the Heroku Router, every connection between the router and your application dyno risked incurring the latency penalty of a TCP slow start. To understand why this is a performance bottleneck for modern web applications, we must look at the fundamentals of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and its history with HTTP.
I’ll make this plain and simple: If your app does not let me read back, the character-for-character raw text I put into the editor, it does NOT support markdown.
“That cannot be done.” Is rarely true, but it’s a phrase I’ve heard more and more from technical people without offering any rationale or further explanation. This tendency to use absolute language when making blocking statements reminded me of a useful “McDonald’s rule” that I was introduced to many years ago when deciding where to eat with friends. It goes something like this:
Why aren’t people writing more types? Perhaps it’s because the intermediate and expert developers deleted the patterns that didn’t work and left no trace for beginners to learn from. This post details some code I recently deleted that has a pattern I call the “duplicate duck.” You can learn the process I used to develop the type, and why I deleted it. Further, I advocate for Rust developers to document and share their mistakes in the hope that we can all learn from them.
Update (2025/04/02): The change I suggested below was merged in PR #64. It’s pretty neat I went from knowing nothing about this project to contributing to it in the span of a single blog post.
I’m not exactly sure about the timeline, but at some point, gem install sassc stopped working for me on my Mac (ARM). Initially, I thought this was because that gem was no longer maintained, and the last release was in 2020, but I was wrong. It’s 100% installable today. Read the rest to find out the real culprit and how to fix it.
