Weeknotes #86

After it was recommended on several podcasts, I downloaded Mela so I could save all of Felicity Cloake’s “How to cook the perfect…” recipes. However, its automatic recipe extraction didn’t seem to work on The Guardian’s articles despite Tom trying it out for me before buying. I realised it was due to The Guardian’s use of AMP on mobile and once I switched to the regular version of the site, I was able to successfully archive how to make perfect porridge for posterity.

I’ve made the mistake of doing tech support for Mac-using family members by asking them to point their phone cameras at their screen. This is inevitably frustrating and results in my repeatedly asking “I’m staring at the corner of your screen, can you please move the camera?”

I can highly recommend switching to Messages’ little known screen sharing feature instead.

After relying on the kindness of neighbours for years, I finally caved and bought the cheapest HP laser printer I could find. Setting it up on our network required using an iOS app. Given there are apps I bought in the early days of the App Store that no longer run on modern devices, I wonder how long HP will continue to maintain an app for an ageing printer.

At work, we finished upgrading all our Ruby on Rails applications to 7.0.1 and Ruby 3.1.0. The biggest change was to migrate from Sprockets and Webpacker to Propshaft, CSS Bundling for Rails and JavaScript Bundling for Rails.

DHH has written about Rails 7’s approach to JavaScript and the move from webpack to esbuild has resulted in significantly faster build times. However, we were caught out by a few things in testing:

1. esbuild doesn’t support CSS Modules out of the box but you can use a plugin to handle them.
2. esbuild will bundle the full, development version of React unless you specify the minify option or set NODE_ENV to production.
3. esbuild targets the latest JavaScript and CSS features by default and doesn’t fully support transforming JavaScript to ES5 (which means dropping support for IE 11). However, we can target our most popular browsers by setting target to edge95,chrome92,safari12,firefox78.

Similarly, when switching from Sprockets to the Dart Sass CLI, we didn’t realise we were no longer benefiting from Autoprefixer Rails and so had to combine it with PostCSS in our build:css script (though we still have to figure out the development setup).

All of this complexity might seem painful but there’s something appealing about these moving pieces being more visible.