In 2023, I decided to start writing weekly notes and I ended up posting only 2. I’m hoping to do better this year, without putting too much pressure on myself either.
Scrobbler, No Scrobbling!
I stopped using Last.fm a while ago for reasons I can’t explain without using the shrug emoji. From discovering new artists using recommendations to having a pointless competition with friends about your total number of “scrobbled” songs, as well as starting to dabble with APIs and building fun stuff, I used to love Last.fm. Today I ran into a post from Niléane about her Last.fm profile and it made me wanna write about it.
Cheating with rounded percentages and floating-point numbers
My friends are mean sometimes, but as they were making fun of my maths skills, they also pointed to a valid error on the website. On a specific page of Comics-Outmash, a list of percentages are displayed. They looked totally legit, except that once you added them all up, the total was a little bit more than 100%. This is easy to fix if you’re not afraid of massaging the numbers.
I met with GitHub to talk about Copilot
A few weeks ago, I received an email from a GitHub employee working on Copilot. They wanted to talk to users about their paste experience. I don’t generally participate to surveys (out of laziness and “I don’t have time for this”-ness), but because I like GitHub and had a somewhat disappointing experience with Copilot when I tried it earlier this spring, I decided to share my honest feedback. To my surprise, they got back to me to schedule a call.
Using and testing Vapor Queues
When you’re working on a backend application, you want your response time to be as low as possible, which is complicated when the server has to interact with third party services to send emails, process files and so on. Vapor provides a library that allows you to move this work out of the request’s critical path by dispatching jobs into queues and processing them in the background. Let’s see how to integrate it into a simple project and what are our options for testing.