Sam Wilson's Website

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  1. Get Blogging!

    This is a good site to point people to when trying to explain why anyone should start a blog:

    https://getblogging.org

    A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

    Remember that your blog is yours! Your posts can contain exactly what you want them to: a sentence of text or a novel-length essay; photos and videos; audio; links and bookmarks. What you want to share is entirely up to you.

  2. ORMs

    I’ve got this weird little project that I’ve been working on a bit, and I keep trying to remove the ORM system. It’s not that ORMs are terrible, they’re not, they’re great sometimes. But when it comes down to it I just find it more annoying. I love looking at the database query report for any given page in the app, and knowing exactly what each is for and that each is useful. It’s just so easy to end up with lots of random look-up queries with an ORM set-up — it seems that it’s common to have a foreign key, and to not actually care about any of the attributes of the foreign record, but the ORM ends up querying for it. I don’t mean the whole “n+1 selects” problem, that’s annoying but not all that hard to avoid. It’s the extra queries that don’t really effect performance that bother me. I’d rather have a bit of a say over what’s run.

  4. sfo2 → syd1

    My websites are now all moved to Digital Ocean in Sydney. They were hosted in a few places overseas (mainly DO in California), and since DO opened their Sydney region I’ve been meaning to switch. It’s quite amazing how much quicker it is! So nice to type in a terminal with 50ms latency instead of 300.

    Whenever I do this sort of thing I wonder if it’s worth carrying on with self-hosting. It takes a little bit of time, sometimes, although not really all that much. The main downside is just the feeling that I don’t really know enough. That said, I’ve been doing it since about 2006 and everything’s sort of gone according to plan in that time.

  7. In reply to this post by Sam Wilson.

    Oh! It’s blasted VS Code. It goes “bibble” on some random syntax weirdnesses or something. Maybe it’s “wouble”.

  8. I’ve upgraded something on my computer, and now there’s a new alert noise. But it’s very soft, and peculiar, and I can’t figure it out. Maybe this is like the time there was a cockroach in a aluminium can but it sounded more like a rat in the roof. Is there a bug in my headphones?

  10. I had a dream last night about adding a search box to the top right corner of a website. Is the universe trying to tell me something?