ScottW's Blog

The first completed book of 2023 is Die With Zero by Bill Perkins (@bp22).

I heard about this book a couple of years ago, but I thought it was a “fuck the kids and spend it all” kind of book. I was very wrong.

Instead, the book focuses on the following:

• Understand how much money you need for the rest of your life and adjust your work habits based on this (slow down when you have enough, find more meaningful work, etc.)
• Do your best to have amazing experiences sooner than later. We often push things off for the future, but as you age (and your loved ones as well), your ability to enjoy those experiences in a meaningful way diminishes
• Don’t wait until you die to give money to your children, charities, etc. Like you, a $1 today is far more valuable than a $1 tomorrow.

The audio version of the book takes about 4 hours (I think) on 1.2x speed and is worth a listen.

Quick Tip: This All the Hacks interview made me reconsider reading/listening to the book.

VSCode Short Cut for currently open files: control+tab.

I forget this one often and have to use the regular command+p and search through all of my projects' files. Hopefully, sharing this helps me to remember it….again control+tab. 😄

All The Hacks - is a fantastic podcast on life, money, and travel. I have been binging it for a couple of weeks now. Highly recommended.

Here are my pics for round 1 of the playoffs

• 49ers (-9) over Seahawks - It looks like 49ers hit a moonshot with Purdy.
• Jags over Chargers - Jags +1.5, the money line is tougher. Both coaches are gamblers, but Peterson has actually won in the past.
• Bills (-13.5) over Dolphins - 13.5 is a significant number, but I doubt this one will be within 20 points.
• Giants (+3) over Vikings - The Giants will win and do not need the points.
• Ravens (+9) over Bengals. - The Bengals will win since the Ravens cannot score, but 9 is too many points. If it comes out that the Ravens hate Lamar, I could be swayed.
• Buc (+2.5) over the Cowboys - My hate for the Cowboys might cloud my judgment, but they have not looked great. My guess is the Cowboys will win, but it is close because Dak is Dak.

I would hate to see Tweetbot go, but considering Twitter makes zero revenue from it, and it has no ads, I am not shocked.

Even the Twitter blue folks only get to skip a portion of the ads.

I enjoy the three extra clicks it takes to do a traditional call instead of using huddles. #neverhuddles

The SaaS Playbook - a new book by @robwalling - will be an instant purchase once available.

I didn’t realize Bullet Train was now open source (it looks like you have to pay to use Stripe, but that feels very fair).

I have not dug too deeply into yet, so no opinion other than it is probably worth looking through it before you start your next project.

U.S. Stock Market Returns by Year

Interesting overview of 1872-2022. 2022 felt extremely painful but apparently it was minor compared to 2008.

Not bad for midafternoon Saturday. I was planning on just hanging out at a coffee shop most of the morning in NYC, but listened to a large chunk of Dying with Zero and just walked.

I could do the hipster thing.

Migrating from a Postgres Cluster to Distributed SQLite with LiteFS

I love me some Postgres, but the SQLite with LiteFS (via @flydotio) just sounds fun.

After nearly 12 years, we finally moved from $redis on KickoffLabs to REDIS.

All it took was Standard to yell at me for a week or so (and my inability to disable the rule in this project 😄)

I have been a user of CommandTabPlus for years, but it is not working reliability anymore. I am unsure if this relates to Ventura or whatnot, but it was time to move on.

AltTab does everything in CommandTabPlus, but with more reliability (and it is free/open source).

The only feature it is missing is an option to group windows from the same apps, but for anyone who uses OS X spaces and wants to ensure CMD+Tab only shows windows in the current space, AltTab is a great tool.

In addition, I like the option of having multiple keyboard shortcuts to cycle through windows differently.

I am currently using three:

1. cmd+tab - windows in the current space
2. option +` - active app in the current space
3. option + tab - active app in all spaces

FTC Proposes Ban on Worker Non-Compete Clauses

The agency stated that non-compete clauses harm healthy competition in the labor and product markets and block entrepreneurship, and estimated that the rule could increase workers’ earnings by almost $300 billion per year.

My favorite 2022 Christmas present.

Mastodon & Microposts

My favorite RSS reader now has much better support for Mastodon. If you want to keep up with your favorite tooter and do not want to get completely sucked in, give Feedbin a spin.

Excalidraw - Free tool to make hand-drawn sketches in your browser. Open source as well.

Steps to use solargraph for Rails projects in VS Code (WIP)

This is quite handy. I am unsure how it would handle multiple versions of Ruby, so I skipped updating the shim location and instead just installed the gems in my main 2 Ruby versions.

A nice quality-of-life improvement in Ruby 3.2 Enumerator::product

How to validate the presence of a boolean field in a Rails model

There is a subtle bug that happens when validating the presence of boolean fields in Rails. Ensuring adequate test coverage helps us find those issues before they hit production.

Crontab.guru

The quick and simple editor for cron schedule expressions

I do not write crontabs often, but when I do, it is usually with Crontab.guru.

Active Record enum form select

I find myself using this on almost all of my rails projects. I am surprised something like this isn’t available out of the box yet.

Zion and Embiid moving like big men should not be able to move.

If Zion learns to finish with his right, he will drop 40 a game.

I took this photo on New Year’s Eve.

Tommy Bahama chairs at Costco is the shopping reminder that Spring is on the way.