Headshot of Roy Lindauer
Roy Lindauer

Artist, Linux user, PHP and Ruby coder, DevOps evangelist.

/microblog

This is my microbog. Random thoughts, notes, ideas, links, musings, etc.

Affinity

The affinity news kinda sucks. On the surface it looks like a good deal but there is a lot of historical precedence that this is just another step on a path to full enshittification of the software suite. This is not a move that will benefit users long term. Then again, such is the cycle of software.

As Matthias Ott explains very well, design tools come and go. Affinity tools have been fucking awesome for me for years. And they will continue to work fine for a while. I will set my sights on other tools soon. Stay curious and have a beginners mind.

Ruby Central

Ruby community is in a bit of a crisis. RubyCentral has performed a hostile takeover of RubyGems and Bundler. You can read a pretty non-biased accounting of what transpired here. I, however, am full of bias. I just do not trust RubyCentral. I love programming with Ruby. It’s a joy. Watching what transpired with RubyCentral, and learning more about some of the public faces of popular Ruby projects, has just turned me off.

The events have also widened my view of the community - hanami looks incredible, i have also been tinkering with roda. And to be real, I can just write ruby without participating in rails, rubycentral, shopify, etc. We don’t need them. I certainly don’t. I am very fortunate in that regard.

https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/
An incredible dive into why you don't need, or really don't want, React for your next web project. I agree with mostly everything here. What's stood out is that we offload too much to user machines, and in fact, put too much emphasis on the developer experience and organizational baggage than on real user needs. Also, use hotwire or htmx.
https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/terminal
Joplin is a neat note-taking app. Also does "todos". Has a CLI which is pretty useful if you spend a lot of time on the command line. I've started tinkering with the tool and it's neat. I think if you version control the data this becomes even more useful.
https://norsemythologist.com/
Pretty fun site I found when watching American Gods and looking up why Wednesday was named such. I knew that Thursday was "Thor's Day," but did not know Wednesday is Odin's Day. Tuesday is for Tyr. Sunday and Monday are named for the Sun and the Moon. Friday is Odins wife Frigg. Interesting stuff, especially as I am slowly digging into Anglo-Saxon paganism, which shares some roots in Norse as well.
https://thetruesize.com
Want to know how big our world's land masses really are? Fun site giving you the real scale of the world's countries in comparison to each other.
https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/
They are hosting their site on a Nintendo Wii. I love it. So fun!
https://modernagejournal.com/notes-toward-the-definition-of-kitsch/249336/
I have been learning about kitsch, what makes art kitsch, what makes art "art," and how all of this craft evolves. What was avant-garde in the past could be kitsch today. Or hell, even just taking someone's real "art" and mass-reproducing it beyond reason can dilute the work so much it falls into kitsch. The Mona Lisa, for example. It's like right on the edge and it's just now a de facto avatar of "art" without meaning.

I started reading the Anxious Generation today and it is fascinating! Like, you just _know_ that phones are a problem, it's obvious, but what I realize now is less obvious is just _how_ they are a problem. To sum it up as I understand it so far; social media has been engineering to bypass crucial and important learning paths for youth during the most sensitive and important points in their development as members of society.

Spring is here! Backyard is setup. I will now live outside until November. Our poor apricot tree has blossomed, it survives another year. Hoping we get some fruit :)

Severance season 2 finale was meh. I'm bored by vibes shows and intentionally vague dialog. Season 2 had some good moments but after 3 years, I really wanted something more. I had expectations and it did not live up to them. That's on me.

I spent most of March sick. Literally 3 weeks just feel like they disappeared. It's been disorienting coming back; I celebrated a birthday, the time changed, and now it's spring. All of that is a blur.

I am learning how to incorporate AI into my day to day in more meaningful and impactful ways. Next up is to work with MCP servers to fine tune. It's all very fun. At the same time I want to find more ways to avoid touching computer. Hard to do when everything is computer.

https://phptherightway.com/
Doing more PHP these days. So I am catching up on better practices and modern php. I thought this site was a very helpful resource.
https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#introduction
Learn to write clear, idiomatic Go.
https://gorails.com/
Learn Ruby on Rails. Gorails is amazing. Chris Oliver is a beast.
https://boringrails.com/
Solutions to everyday boring problems in web development to keep you productive.
https://hybrd.co/posts/adding-meta-tags-to-a-rails-cms-with-polymorphism
Solid model for adding seo meta to your rails cms.
https://anthonydmays.com/blog/2022/05/09/how-to-practice-leetcode-problems-the-right-way/
I've been practing leetcode to support and strengthen my understanding of data structures and algorithms. This article does a great job of helping you with how to think about and actually practice leetcode.
https://manifesto.getglu.dev/
Loved this CI/CD manifesto. I was taught to think about the devops and CI/CD pipeline the same way, and so learned to build them this way. Glad I did. The gist is to write them to be developer friendly and to be debuggable. The way I do that is with Ruby, because of how easy it is to create a DSL with Ruby. Also Rake is a great interface for things like pipeline code.
https://pippinbarr.com/it-is-as-if-you-were-on-your-phone/info/

Really funny site that simulates what it is like to just be on your phone.

Look at you! On your phone! But you’ve got a secret! And you won’t tell! You’re not on your phone! It is only as if you were on your phone! You’re just pretending to be on your phone! On your phone!
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rgb-hsl
Pretty cool new way to handle color in CSS. The gist as I understand it is it will give more reasonable and expected results as you lighten and darken a color. Additionally, it's an expanded color space (P3 color?) which means, if your monitor supports it, we can use more colors. Neat.
https://www.cosive.com/blog/my-washing-machine-refreshed-my-thinking-on-software-effort-estimation
So often in my own job I am asked to estimate effort of something similar to what we have built before. And I get so much push back about how "easy" something should be. But we often fail to account for the unknowns, and fail to explain clearly that the 10% difference is the difference between a 1 day task and a 2 week task. This article does a great job of explaining that.
https://hybrd.co/posts/adding-meta-tags-to-a-rails-cms-with-polymorphism
Great way to include meta tags in a Rails app. I've done this in a very similar way, but this article does a great job of explaining the why and how.
https://indieweb.org/
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the "corporate web". Build your own website, control your own data, post to your own site. Syndicate to the wider web. It's pretty neat, I am starting to tinker and integrate into my own site.

I finished reading a Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms. Really glad I read it. It filled many gaps I had on some fundamentals, like _how_ big notation works and why we do it and why and when we use certain data structures.

Also finished reading Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Incredible book. Reflecting on myself while reading and seeing just how much my ego has been in my way for most of my life, was not easy. But I am so glad I did.

Got a new workstation setup, a System76 Thelio Spark Premium (with sick pink racing stripe lol), to be my new home for deep work this year. It was a "grand gesture", a way to encourage and support myself while I do the deep work. It's going well so far!

Building this blog has been a lot of fun. Glad I moved away from micro.blog, not that their service is bad in any way, quite the opposite, I just really value building my own thing. It's very fun and rewarding.

I built a companion service for static websites. Currently, it scans new posts for urls to submit as webmentions, provides a commenting API, and provides an imageproxy service to do on demand image resizing and caching. In the future it will be a webmention provider, and syndicate posts to places like Bluesky, Mastodon, and maybe LinkedIn. I will probably write a full blog post about it.