MonoLisa is a new coding-focused font by Marcus Sterz:
As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such. Yet we spend most of our days looking at screens reading and writing code. Using a wrong font can negatively impact our productivity and lead to bugs. MonoLisa was designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.
Speaking of Github, this week it was also announced that Github (aka Microsoft) has acquired the de-facto package manager for JavaScript, npm.
Nat Friedman, on Github's blog:
npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they've helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.
On what's next:
Looking further ahead, we'll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it.
That sounds very cool. Excited to see that piece come together.
For this Mac-loving tech kid that grew up in the 90’s, I still cringe any time I hear Microsoft doing anything. But this is not the Microsoft of then. They’ve done well with Github so far. They’re doing amazing things with the cloud. I need to get over it. Hopefully this is a new great beginning for npm.
New this week: a brand new native iOS and Android app for Github. From what I can tell these are completely native apps. Maybe there’s some web embedded stuff in there, but if there is, I can’t tell and it’s super slick and fast. As it should be.
The app seems very well designed and thoroughly considered. Handy for managing Pull Requests and Issues on the go.
Very nice looking app for debugging network requests. Reminds me of the beautiful and powerful Paw app. I love that these little development and tech tools are being so well done lately, rather than having to use some awful cross-platform Java app. via Brent Simmons
It's the number one trending video on YouTube today for good reason. This video clearly explains what we know so far about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it affects the human body.
[...] these simulations vastly oversimplify the complexity of real life. Yet just as simulitis spread through the networks of bouncing balls on your screen, covid-19 is spreading through our human networks — through our countries, our towns, our workplaces, our families. And, like a ball bouncing across the screen, a single person's behavior can cause ripple effects that touch faraway people.
To no one's surprise, Apple announced today that this year's WWDC will be online-only due the "current health situation."
We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead.
Ben Thompson interviews Matt Mullenweg about Automattic's distributed workforce. Ben and Matt are two of my favorite people on the web, so it's delightful to hear them discuss this topic. The interview is behind Ben's subscription paywall, so if you're not already subscribed, you should!
Mullenweg:
People are surprised when I say this, but I think in-person is really key. And so we just flip it, so instead of saying you have to be an around your colleagues 48 weeks of the year and do whatever you want for a month, we say be wherever you want for 48 weeks out of the year and for three or four weeks a year we're going to bring you together. And that might be once a year for the whole company, and then your individual team, which is probably five to 15 people, you'll see them two or three times a year and you can build that trust. There's nothing, no technology, VR or otherwise, that has the same effect of breaking bread across the table or sharing a drink with someone, for building trust, for building communication, for getting to know someone.
Working remotely in a distributed company shouldn’t replace all face-to-face communication and interaction. It’s just not the default.
And, later:
I think that when you become a truly distributed company versus just trying to recreate your meetings and everything else you do online, you start to realize how much more valuable it is to move things to be asynchronous versus synchronous because that opens up a ton of flexibility, autonomy, and agency between all of your colleagues.
Bingo. Synchronous communication (where everyone must stop and do something at the same time) is my number one productivity killer.
Like everyone else, I have become anxious about the Coronavirus Pandemic. It is hard to discern the actual impact, especially since social media is conflating facts with fiction. I have begun keeping a document that is full of links to articles, research, commentary, and videos that come from experts — scientists, immunologists, viral disease researchers, and sources that could only be said to be biased toward logic and caution. In other words, I am paying very little attention to the self-proclaimed experts who are investors, car company chiefs, or anyone else who thought Corona was just a beer till about a month ago.
Instead of keeping it on Google Docs, I have decided to share it here on the blog, and I will be continuously updating it with new links. I am no expert, but I have a pretty good sense of who to ignore and when to pay attention.
It’s been a busy week for remote working fans and first-timers with all of the safety measures being put in place for COVID-19. Here are some of the better links I’ve found recently:
Kevin Roose: Sorry, but Working From Home Is Overrated I think he’s missing the point here. Working from home shouldn’t (and doesn’t) mean working in isolation. Communication, breaks, and personal health should be focused on whether working in an office or remote!
I’m really enjoying Tot, a new utility from The Iconfactory. It's a simple little window with a few scratch pads for text, organized by color. Tot appears to be a very basic app on the surface but features an exceptional level of design quality and attention to detail. Interesting pricing model too: free on the Mac, $20 on iOS. During the week I have about a million little text windows open with all sorts of scratch information. On iOS I've struggled to find a similar solution for these quick notes and pieces of text. I don't need to keep them forever, sometimes just a few minutes, so it's nice to have a little scratchpad that syncs. Tot also uses a small subset of Markdown, which is really handy for basic formatting. Even better: the library for handling Markdown was open sourced on Github. Worth the $20 price alone just to fund this library's development.
Last week I open sourced a new Ruby library called Tally. Tally was created over the past few years as a part of a number of products I’ve worked on and I’ve always wanted to open it up to the public for anyone else to use as they see fit. It's a bit techy, so it doesn't feel right here in the journal, but I posted a bit about it here, in case you're curious.
Last week I open sourced a new RubyGem called Tally. Tally was created over the past few years as a part of a number of products I’ve worked on and I’ve always wanted to open it up to the public for anyone else to use as they see fit.
Tally is a quick utility for collecting counters and stats throughout a Rails application. Technically I suppose it could be used outside of Rails in a standard Ruby app, but that’s not my use-case so I haven’t spent any time optimizing it for that.
Tally sits on top of Redis for fast collection of these counters. The goal of the stat collection was to make it as fast as possible so that counters could be incremented throughout your application code in real-time.
Periodically throughout the day the counters are extracted from Redis and archived into a standard ActiveRecord model within your application. There’s a single table added to your database that keeps track of the counters each day after they are archived.
That’s it. It’s a quick and simple way to get basic stats reporting into an application. There are certainly bigger players in this space, and I’ve used several before as well. StatsD is a great example of a much more robust and scalable tool for this sort of thing. But in my recent use cases, it’s just a bit overkill. Sure, I could spin up StatsD and get it all to work. But I had bigger areas that I wanted to focus on, so Tally is a great place to start.
Side note: if you’re wanting to collect millions and millions of data points, you probably need something different here. Tally can work, but there are better tools for that job.
I’m currently using Tally for few specific needs, which I think are perfect use cases for the project. Here are a few use cases so far…
Use Case 1: Tracking Ad Impressions
First, I run a private ad server for a current project. I didn’t want to use a third-party ad server for privacy concerns and because I generally don’t trust that industry. That’s another story, for another day. However, it is important to report to our brand advertisers on how well advertising campaigns are performing. This includes impressions (views of each ad) and clicks. For video-based ads I also track the number of plays and completion percentage to see how well everything is performing. All of this is done privately with no user or personal information whatsoever shared with anyone.
Here’s a quick mockup of how it works. There is an AdUnit model in our database. It just stores basic data about the ads. Click-through links, the artwork for the ad, video streaming locations, and that sort of thing. Within that model, we use the Tally::Countable concern:
# app/models/ad_unit.rb
class AdUnit < ApplicationRecord
include Tally::Countable
# ...
end
Then, in the controller that renders the ad unit, we simply increment the impressions counter each time it is displayed:
# app/controllers/ad_units_controller.rb
class AdUnitsController < ApplicationController
# GET /ad-units/:id
def show
@ad_unit = AdUnit.find(params[:id])
@ad_unit.increment_tally(:impressions)
end
end
We have a similar process to handle tracking for when an ad is clicked. To preserve the privacy of our readers we don’t directly link to the advertiser’s site. When an ad is clicked the link first goes through our server to clean any identifiable information from the user. This is also a great place for me to increment the clicks counter so I can accurately track how many people clicked on each ad.
From these two Tally counters we can derive something that looks like the screen below and see how many impressions and clicks each ad unit received:
Tally counters for tracking ad impressions and clicks (This data is all fake, don't read into it!)
The tracking for all of this is incredibly simple and with a few queries to get the data out of Tally, we have enough information to share with advertisers on how well their campaign is performing.
Use Case 2: Tracking Subscriber Counts over time
My second current use case is to keep track of the total number of subscribers (aka users) of my product on a daily basis. Since Tally is created specifically to track counts by day, this is a perfect way to collect data.
I could increment a counter of each time a new subscriber signs up. But that’s a bit unnecessary since each time someone signs-up there will be a new Subscriber record in my database. So I’m using Tally’s custom calculators feature to quickly count the number of subscribers and store it along with Tally’s other records.
Here’s a quick and dirty example of how I do this:
# in an initializer file,
# something like config/initializers/tally.rb
Tally.register_calculator "SubscribersCalculator"</code></pre>
Then, I have the calculator in a service class inside my app folder:
# in app/calculators/subscribers_calculator.rb
class SubscribersCalculator
include Tally::Calculator
def call
start_at = day.beginning_of_day
end_at = day.end_of_day
count = Subscriber.where(created_at: start_at..end_at).count
{
key: :subscribers,
value: count
}
end
end
The Tally::Calculator concern automatically sets up an initializer and the day variable is the current Date, or the date that we want collect data for. Each time the Tally archive process runs (I run it hourly) this calculator is run and the data is stored alongside the other Tally counts I’ve collected.
To make things a bit more detailed we can also store the number of signups for each referral source. This is helpful to know where subscribers are finding our site from when they sign up each day. (Are people finding us from search, social media, organic traffic, a paid traffic campaign, etc.) In my use case, I have a source enum value on the Subscriber model that stores this information when the subscriber registers:
class Subscriber < ApplicationRecord
enum source: %w( organic search social paid )
# ...
end
If we wanted to collect subscriber counts by source, we could modify the calculator to something like this:
class SubscribersCalculator
include Tally::Calculator
def call
start_at = day.beginning_of_day
end_at = day.end_of_day
result = []
scope = Subscriber.where(created_at: start_at..end_at)
# store the total number of subscribers for this day
result.push(
key: :subscribers,
value: scope.count
)
# store the number of subscribers for each source
Subscriber.sources.keys.each do |source|
count = scope.where(source: source).count
result.push(
key: "#{ source }_subscribers",
value: count
)
end
result
end
end
This updated calculator will store the total number of subscribers each day, and also the total number of subscribers per referral source. After a few days of gathering data we can produce a simple report like this to show a graph of our new subscribers:
An example of Tally counters placed into some charts (This data is all fake, don't read into it!)
So that’s the initial release of Tally. It’s a simple but very powerful tool for collecting stats in a Rails application. It’s been very useful for me over the years, and I hope it can be useful to others.
The full documentation and README for Tally is available on Github and I’m certainly open to Pull Requests, Issues, bug reports, or other feedback.
[…] Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become.
We are outraged that there have been times when individuals took advantage of our programs to abuse innocent children and sincerely apologize to anyone who was harmed during their time in Scouting. We believe victims, we support them, we provide counseling by a provider of their choice, and we encourage them to come forward. We believe that all victims should receive our support and compensation – and we have taken decisive action to make that possible. Our plan is to use this Chapter 11 process to create a Trust that would provide equitable compensation to these individuals.
It is incredibly sad to see what the Boy Scouts has become. As a kid I spent so much time at scouting events, campouts, and meetings. My memories are all incredibly positive and the experience I gained from scouting has been a big part of my life. However it is clear that my story is certainly not the only story. It’s easy for me to say from my position of privilege that this organization is all good. But it’s heartbreaking to hear these stories of repeated and institutionalized abuse. I hope this is the first big step towards correcting these wrongs and fixing the problem for good.
Taylor boarded a flight to London shortly after New Year's Day 1968. His friend had given him the number of Peter Asher, the brother of McCartney's then girlfriend Jane Asher; he had just been hired as a talent scout for the Beatles' new label. Asher liked Taylor's demo and arranged an audition with McCartney and Harrison. "I was very nervous. But I was also, you know, on fire," he laughs. "In my sort of mellow, sensitive way." He played his song Something In the Way She Moves (a line Harrison pinched for the opening line of his song Something) and they signed him then and there to make his eponymous first album. At the time, the Beatles were making the White Album. "We intersected in the studio a lot," says Taylor. "They were leaving as I was coming in. I often came in early and would sit in the control room and listen to them recording – and hear playbacks of what they had just cut." Did you hang out together? "Yeah," he says. I ask if the band was unravelling by that point. "Well, it was a slow unraveling, but it was also an extremely creative unravelling."
I had always thought it was Taylor using that line from Harrison. Great story.
