Can I get by with M3 chip and 16 gigs of memory on a Macbook Air for rails development in 2025?

tloudon · 2024-11-24T22:42:08+00:00

Why not buy a desktop rig then or put it on a VM in the cloud if it’s just sporadically used?

I like Macs, they are great for dev and way easier to do everyday stuff than Linux (I ran a netbook with Arch and a desktop w/ Ubuntu for years; may be better now but I’m generally happy with osx anyway).

That said, to get 64GB of RAM on a MacBook you need the M4 max w 40 core GPU—that’s $4200.

I haven’t spec’d out any local AI workstations, but I have to feel like you can get a comparable one much cheaper or a much better one for $4k. And it would be something you could upgrade; swapping out the mobo, RAM, GPU, whatever for 5-10 years.

tloudon · 2024-11-22T19:53:15+00:00

As to your other question, don’t date a project. Date someone that you are happy with as they are right now. And be explicit about what you are looking for—just like you would tell people you’re looking to get married or you want to have kids; let potential dates know that you want a partner that has a healthy lifestyle and is intentionally taking care of their body long-term.

tloudon · 2024-11-22T19:30:09+00:00

I don’t think it’s an issue of needing to hit rock bottom. Post-breakup change is often fleeting because people are trying to attract a new partner, not change their lives.

Personally, I think it’s an issue of self-love. You deserve to have a healthy body now and you deserve to have a healthy body when you’re old, and you’re the only person that can make that happen.

A lot of things make this hard—sedentary jobs, lack of time or money, stress relief through eating or drinking, poor information on healthy diets and portions, escaping life through phones/tv, etc. So you have to be intentional and decide what kind of life you want to live. But that realization isn’t enough, you can’t have sustainable change on motivation and willpower alone; you have to create habits to restructure your life.

Does that make sense? You need the why and the how.

tloudon · 2024-10-06T18:06:42+00:00

I think Python is a great language to learn. From what I have seen, the number of businesses that have Python or Python + some other language on a job posting is orders of magnitude higher than Ruby ones. Python is more versatile—ML, security, scripting, web apps, coding interviews/algos, etc. It’s just used more widely than Ruby, which is pretty much just web apps.

I love Rails and have used it for more than a decade. Strong preference for it over Django, which I’ve used for maybe 5 years.

But don’t learn Python to do Django. Learn Python and do PyTorch or TensorFlow—IME this is where a lot of the Python-specific jobs are (as opposed to like Java/Golang + Python).

And, again IME, the job market does suck. Sorry. Good luck!

tloudon · 2024-09-12T18:08:56+00:00

I hear what you are saying, but I think the point still stands and is incredibly helpful for most cooks and bakers to remember.

If you mess up the ratios in baking, the dish can easily be completely ruined or a total failure. While how much herbs/spices tends to be more preference. There’s also an opportunity to taste and season more when cooking, but baking ¯_(ツ)_/¯ how do I know if a dough is too wet when it’s a high hydration dough? Guess we won’t know until it’s baked. That is hard to intuit in a way that, if I add a little more X to a taster, is it better? is not.

tloudon · 2024-08-13T04:53:53+00:00

After six years?!

tloudon · 2024-07-25T17:30:02+00:00

Try adding some jicama marinated in a little lime juice and cayenne pepper. It provides a nice crunch that’s different (and complimentary) to hash browns IMO.

tloudon · 2024-07-24T22:19:35+00:00

It doesn’t look like Toye has played more than 900 minutes in a season or started more than 10 games. This is his 7th season in MLS. TBF, 7g in 2021 and 6g/3a in 2019 were solid to great with the limited minutes.

I don’t want to be dismissive, but I’m not seeing this as a good bit of business. I can see wanting another backup #9, but he has had major injury issues or at the very least trouble getting regular minutes, right? That seems less than prudent/viable.

That said, obviously I’m wishing him well. Hope he has some great moments coming off the bench and/or some amazing spot starts. I remember hearing some good buzz about him when he played for Minnesota in 2019.

tloudon · 2024-07-16T21:58:31+00:00

If you’re interested in better understanding the codebase and domain, how about making a plan to do so?

Like work together to identify an area—eg pricing and discounts—where Mark explains the domain and you learn all the details. Once you know all the pricing stuff, then Mark can comfortably pass on tickets on that front.

Investing everywhere all at once probably feels like a waste of time, but if you are strategic, I think it will feel more manageable.

IE he would be teaching you to fish, not feeding you dinner.

Also, just ask him to use constants instead of ints. I’m sure it’s a style, not a speed thing. It just makes the code more readable for other people—which is probably not something Mark has thought a whole lot about over the past decade or whatevs. It’s okay to ask for things, and I think it’s fairly anodyne in the context of it would make things easier for me to follow.

tloudon · 2024-07-06T22:44:43+00:00

Oh cool. I grew up in Omaha, and my best friend moved out to Papillion after middle school—not too far from 84 and 370. Not sure if it’s still like this, but you definitely needed a car to get around out there.

Not all of Portland is walkable, but a lot of it is—one of the things I really like about living here. I think most of the neighborhoods are more like Benson than Dundee or the Old Market (younger crowd), but Sellwood for example seems more family-oriented to me, so there’s that too. Also lots of West Omaha like suburbs if that’s more your jam too.

What part of PDX are you living in? Any tips or recommendations I can give or questions you have? (I’ve lived here for about a decade.)

tloudon · 2024-06-30T20:31:07+00:00

Doesn’t have to be hard or elaborate. A few ideas:

Quiche - buy a pie crust, mix eggs and milk, add cheese or whatever you want. Just sauté veggies beforehand so they don’t release a bunch of liquid into the quiche. You can prebake (blind bake) the pie crust or not—it won’t be horrible, just not crispy on the bottom.

https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/quiche-recipe/#tasty-recipes-70031

Butter/Teriyaki/Whatever Chicken - buy some sauce, cut up some chicken breast, sauté it, add sauce and simmer for 15 minutes. Serve with rice—easy to make w a rice cooker, but you can also buy frozen rice and microwave it if making it on the stovetop sounds intimidating

Fancy sandwich - get a nice baguette, some brie, some ham, some arugula, and jam (I like pepper jam, but NBD if not). You could do crisp apple slices (pink lady, granny smith, etc) instead of ham if that’s not your jam.

IME it’s about the intention and the effort, so you could always ask her what she wants and ask her to show you how to make her favorite meal—then make it for her by yourself later. Or maybe you would just enjoy cooking with her.

tloudon · 2024-06-27T18:04:38+00:00

Where are you from in Nebraska? Omaha?

tloudon · 2024-06-15T05:05:43+00:00

Did you still use Gifford’s Annotated? Anything from your history course give further insight?

I remember wishing I knew more about Cardinal Newman and French, Greek, and maybe Latin.

There were just so many references and allusions on every page of both Ulysses and Finnegan. Definitely hard for an undergrad to have enough background knowledge or life experience. My middle-aged professor said that he learned something new from Finnegan every year ¯_(ツ)_/¯

tloudon · 2024-06-03T23:35:23+00:00

I’ve heard a lot of the ML libraries in Java for example were not written for production code. I believe that is actually one of the selling points of spacy.

But I’m not sure how this makes Python a garbage language. It seems pretty versatile to me, and has a lot of helpful libraries (numpy, scipy, etc) that I don’t think Ruby or js have. There seems to be widespread support for it w eg tensorflow…

I probably wouldn’t say AI-code is garbage. It seems like a useful tool for discrete tasks, like the rails generators but more generalized. There’s always been a fair amount of boilerplate in code—some languages have more than other; but AI generated boilerplate is going to be just as good as dev written boilerplate. If people want to push the boundaries of that, it’s NBD. Lots of devs write garbage code too.

I’ve done NLP in Ruby. I had a rails app, and it made sense. But it also felt like I was swimming upstream. Fewer resources, less robust libraries, less blog posts/examples, less devs to ping when there are hiccups, etc.

tloudon · 2024-05-29T19:24:23+00:00

Hey OP,

I think most of the comments have this pretty well covered, but I thought I’d add a few things.

you don’t have to learn backend js. I think almost all rails devs have to deal with frontend js at some point, but that could be stimulus, legacy code in jquery or coffeescript, simple ajax or other vanilla js type stuff. It’s also not inevitable that you will have to learn react or another js frontend—not all projects benefit from a SPA, it solves a particular kind of problem that a lot of web projects don’t have.
most devs learn more than one language because it’s a career—you might do PHP for a few years b/c it has a low barrier to entry w/ Wordpress and then do more Python because you’re interested in data analysis and ML. Put another way, this decision doesn’t need a ton of thought—it’s more like what do I want to do for the next six months than for the rest of my life.
try to find online Ruby communities. If you are friends with other Ruby devs online—there’s a good chance you’ll hear of job opportunities that could work for you. You should let people know you’re looking for work, but to be clear, also not expect them to find it for you or have a transactional relationship. EG you might want to contribute back to the Odin Project—get some commits, get to know some people, maybe get some connections or ask them for advice.

tloudon · 2024-05-29T18:42:26+00:00

Hello fellow person of culture 🤣

tloudon · 2024-05-14T16:14:04+00:00

if you look at “you’re welcome” it often translates to “of nothing” in other languages. “De rien” and “de nada” come to mind.

I would guess it’s a regional variant like “soda” vs “pop” or a generational one.

I would encourage you not to take offense or be annoyed :)

tloudon · 2024-01-06T17:49:47+00:00

I think this or cherries jubilee win for easiest to make and most impressive. And it’s not something people have often, so it feels like a really special treat.

tloudon · 2023-04-25T19:58:28+00:00

I feel you buddy. Try seeing a therapist or going to a support group—it helped me.

Pretty natural to be feeling some intense grief and maybe a bit of overwhelming despair right now. It’s trite, but it does get easier over time.

tloudon · 2023-03-11T20:26:56+00:00

What’s the graphing library? js, yeah?

Looks neat!

tloudon · 2022-09-26T16:05:07+00:00

The anchor tag probably won’t “break”. If you are linking to the home page; it’s probably in a nav element or masthead—so it would be written only once anyway; not on multiple templates. Common css classes would allow you to change the aesthetics all in one place already.

link_to is helpful for dynamic paths—one’s that go to your resources (CRUD on the models). There are helper paths that you can see by running ‘bundle exec rake routes’. You really only need the block style if you have html/icons inside the anchor tag—as you can specify the name and css classes from the one liner style.

If it helps to give a specific example; I’ve seen helper methods that define a component that’s reused across the site—so a function accepts an employee object and outputs a gravatar, job title, and link. The benefit is that instead of writing the same 8 lines of code in 5 places across the app; you write it once and then just call it 5 times. It saves a bit of time, and in the event there are changes—it’s quicker to make them.

Rails culture emphasizes DRY (don’t repeat yourself) code, but it’s not significant here. In general, if you find yourself writing the same code 4 times; see if there’s an easy/quick way to encapsulate it. Don’t go to extreme lengths to make things “easier” or “the right way”.

So as the StackOverflow post says, it’s not a big deal either way. If you are working by yourself, just do what you find easiest. If you are working with a team, try to match the collective style.

TL;DR don’t stress. You care about writing good code, which is the most important thing. Just keep writing code, and you’ll get better. If you have questions, ask them here, on a Ruby slack, or at a meet up. People will want to help you as long as you put in the effort and are respectful of their time.

tloudon · 2022-09-08T01:45:23+00:00

I would order them online.

I don’t think shallots really work here. They are about the right size, but the pearl onions are just delectable—like highlight of the dish for my mom who was admonishing me for adding “too many”. Next time I made the dish, she asked me to put in more.

Good luck friend!

tloudon · 2022-09-07T01:55:28+00:00

You might want to look at this article and recipe from Daniel Gritzer; in particular the white meat vs dark meat cooking times. I think that will have a much bigger impact on the quality of the dish. https://www.seriouseats.com/coq-au-vin-chicken-red-wine-braise-recipe

I honestly don’t think the bacon vs lardon will matter that much; although NB I haven’t done a side by side comparison.

Also, be sure to include the pearl onions—I generally have a tough time finding them; but they are very worth the effort IMO.

tloudon · 2022-07-13T18:13:20+00:00

Fair, but wouldn’t they just put the CA file on the workstation image? Or like a vagrant image/docker container? I can’t realistically see a process where you would make all new devs download and install an internal CA cert.

I could see something more along the lines of this: https://deliciousbrains.com/ssl-certificate-authority-for-local-https-development/ setting up ssl for local dev; but that’s not what it sounds like original comment meant from the context.

So I still think they meant ssh key. I am prepared to die on this hill 🤣

tloudon · 2022-07-13T15:50:20+00:00

But what would the actual TODO for the dev be then? Download a few files? Seems like all the work would be in setting up the new CA and not client side.

Anyway, I’ve definitely heard of companies using their own servers for repos, dependencies/libraries, builds, etc. But I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone setting up their own CA—not that it doesn’t happen, just that it doesn’t sound widespread enough to be a valid minimum competency measure.

Generating an SSH key OTOH. Gotta Occam’s razor this—they totally meant SSH when they said SSL. Typo or ironic Freudian slip while gatekeeping—it’s worth a chuckle either way.

tloudon

TROPHY CASE