Pablo Fernandez

  • Using Font Awesome 6 in a Rails 7 project that uses importmaps

    I just figured out how to use Font Awesome 6 in a Rails 7 project that uses importmaps. I’m not entirely sure why this works and why some of the workarounds are needed, but my googling yielded no results when I was searching so hopefully here I’ll be saving the next person some time.

    If you search Rubygems for gems with the name “font awesome” you’ll find quite a few but I didn’t like any of them. They all use the font version of the icons, instead of the SVG, or they are very outdated, or they expect you to use SCSS, which I’m not using at the moment. But ultimately, the team at Font Awesome maintains the NPM packages and we should use those directly, not re-wrap packages that will always be out of date.

    For me, using NPM packages directly was higher priority than using importmaps. That’s how strongly I feel about it. I would have installed Webpacker to use Font Awesome’s main package.

    I managed to make this work, but if I’m frank, I’m not 100% sure why the workarounds are needed, so if you have any insights about it or how to improve this, please drop a comment.

    Font Awesome’s documentation says you should install the fontawesome-free package:

    npm install --save @fortawesome/fontawesome-free

    Instead we are going to pin that package, but also some of the dependencies we need later:

    ./bin/importmap pin @fortawesome/fontawesome-free \
                    @fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core \
                    @fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons \
                    @fortawesome/free-regular-svg-icons \
                    @fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons

    This adds the following lines to your importmap.rb:

    pin "@fortawesome/fontawesome-free", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/fontawesome-free@6.0.0/js/fontawesome.js"
pin "@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core@1.3.0/index.es.js"
pin "@fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons@6.0.0/index.es.js"
pin "@fortawesome/free-regular-svg-icons", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/free-regular-svg-icons@6.0.0/index.es.js"
pin "@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons@6.0.0/index.es.js"

    Then Font Awesome’s documentation says you should add these lines to your code:

    <script defer src="/your-path-to-fontawesome/js/brands.js"></script>
<script defer src="/your-path-to-fontawesome/js/solid.js"></script>
<script defer src="/your-path-to-fontawesome/js/fontawesome.js"></script>

    Which might make you think this is a good idea:

    <script defer src="https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/fontawesome-free@6.0.0/js/brands.js"></script>
<script defer src="https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/fontawesome-free@6.0.0/js/solid.js"></script>
<script defer src="https://ga.jspm.io/npm:@fortawesome/fontawesome-free@6.0.0/js/fontawesome.js"></script>

    But it doesn’t work. It fails with this error:

    Here I’m a bit confused. How come it fails with that error? Any ideas?

    What did work was editing app/javascript/application.js and adding::

    import {far} from "@fortawesome/free-regular-svg-icons"
import {fas} from "@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons"
import {fab} from "@fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons"
import {library} from "@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core"
import "@fortawesome/fontawesome-free"
library.add(far, fas, fab)

    I can’t help but feel that there’s a function or method in fontawesome-free that I could call that would do all the setup automatically with less imports and less library building, but I couldn’t find it yet.

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  • light inside library

    I have a problem: 3 or 5 stars?

    I’m an avid reader and I review every single book I read. I force myself to write at least two paragraphs. This is useful to me because sometimes I forget I have read something; seeing and reading back my own reviews answers the ‘did I already read that’ question but also refreshes my memory on what I thought of it. I do this in Goodreads, where I’m asked to provide a star quality rating of the book, and that’s where the problem starts.

    Normally, I rate them for myself and my rating is this:

    • 5: Amazing book, humanity is better off because this book exists and everyone should read it.
    • 4: Great book, will recommend it to most people.
    • 3: Good book, I enjoyed reading it.
    • 2: Bad book, I didn’t enjoy reading it.
    • 1: Terrible book, this is actively harmful for humanity and should not have been written.

    This naturally means most of my books get 3 stars, some 4 and 2 and even less 5 and 1. It’s a bell curve! Which should surprise no one. Actually, I think there are way more books in the 1-star category out there for consumption, it’s just very rare I accidentally read one. 

    But this is not how most people use star ratings. And it is also not how we are encouraged to use them either. Take Uber: in the event you did not give five stars, it specifically requests you to answer what was wrong with the trip. If the trip was perfectly adequate, it is expected that this be rated five stars. The upshot of this is that there is no way to reflect service that went above and beyond, or was otherwise better than ‘fine.’

    So most people give 5 stars unless there’s something wrong, in which case they start removing stars. 1 thing wrong? 4 stars. 2 things wrong? 3 stars. I think this is a bad way of rating things because, as mentioned above, it means you have no way of differentiating good, great and amazing: they all get the same 5 stars. For a service like Uber this is not such a problem, but for artistic works and for books it doesn’t fit. 

    I used to just do the rating for myself so I didn’t care I was using a different system to the rest. But when publishing on Goodreads and interacting with other people it became rather controversial: I have received both praise and criticism for this. Some people caught on and they know that when I give 4 and 5 stars, it’s a rarity and worth taking a look. Some people asked me why a book that I enjoyed, and recommended to them, is getting only 3 stars.

    What’s really bothering me with my discrepant system is that an author gets a (small) penalty for me being interested in them. Granted, this is tiny and unlikely to be noticed in the grand scheme of readers, but it still bothers me. Their average will go down, which negatively affects public perception, even though it really shouldn’t be perceived that way (to my mind). It also bothers me that an author might see 3 or 4 stars and be hurt and then confused by my positive review.

    Should I give up and remap my review system to what everyone else is doing? I dislike losing a way to signal “This book is amazing” By all means send your suggestions.

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  • A odd numbering system I invented when I was a kid

    When I was a kid, my dad and I had a (friendly) argument. I said that digital displays were better and I wanted them everywhere, for example, as the speedometer of a car. My dad said that dials were better and he made his point:

    Dials are faster to read and remember and if the needle is oscillating, you can still read it and now what the average is.

    — My Dad

    He was right. If your speed was rapidly oscillating between 98km/h and 102km/h on a dial, it was trivial to read, on a digital display, it would be a blur that looks like 199km/h. You could solve it by dampening oscillations, but that creates other problems (lags) and it’s a boring solution.

    My dad was right, so I decided to solve the problem. I spent years thinking about and came up with a solution when I was 13 or so. A numbering system where only one digit changes at a time. Let me demonstrate. 0 through 9 is the same: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. But the next number can’t be 10, because that’s changing two digits at the same time, so it’s 19… now what? Now you go down until you hit 10 and then you can go to 20, because between 10 and 20 there’s only one digit difference. Here’s from 1 to 30, highlighting the ones that are different:

    Normal PSDC
    0 0
    1 1
    2 2
    3 3
    4 4
    5 5
    6 6
    7 7
    8 8
    9 9
    10 19
    11 18
    12 17
    13 16
    14 15
    15 14
    16 13
    17 12
    18 11
    19 10
    20 20
    21 21
    22 22
    23 23
    24 24
    25 25
    26 26
    27 27
    28 28
    29 29
    30 39
    31 38
    32 37
    33 36
    34 35
    35 34
    36 33
    37 32
    38 31
    39 30

    The way it works is that when a digit is odd in the original normal decimal number, the next digit is PSDC is inverted. This is the Python code to convert numbers to PSDC representation:

    def convert_to_psdc(number):
  digits = [int(n) for n in list(str(number))]
  new_digits = []
  for i, digit in enumerate(digits):
    if i == 0 or digits[i - 1] % 2 == 0:
      new_digits.append(digit)
    else:
      new_digits.append(9 - digit)
  return int("".join([str(d) for d in new_digits]))

    Here are a few interesting PSDC numbers:

    Normal PSDC
    0 0
    1 1
    9 9
    10 19
    11 18
    18 11
    19 10
    20 20
    21 21
    99 90
    100 190
    101 191
    189 119
    190 109
    191 108
    999 900
    1000 1900
    1001 1901
    1900 1090
    1901 1091
    9999 9000
    10000 19000
    10001 19001
    99999 90000
    100000 190000
    100001 190001
    999999 900000
    1000000 1900000
    1000001 1900001
    9999999 9000000
    10000000 19000000
    10000001 19000001

    Problem solved! Not really, this is useless… but for some reason 13 year old me started to be obsessed with this and I still think about it frequently.

    If you want to see all the PSDC numbers up to 10k, I published a table on this site.

  • When raising prices is easier than lowering them

    When you are building a B2B SaaS product it’s very hard to know what the appropriate price for your product is. Even if you magically found the correct one, it might not be the correct one next month when you made the product better and you are providing new values. That’s why you need to be constant experimenting with prices on your app.

    When I started my career I was afraid of raising prices, of having to justify why they went up (I wasn’t even aware of grandfathering). When I started to learn that most entrepreneurs set their prices too low, my partner and I decided to set the price too high and then lower it if it was necessary. Without realizing we painted ourselves to a corner.

    We didn’t want to just lower prices, we wanted to experiment with prices (switching from per-user to 3 plans, things like that). The problem was that anything we would come would cost a different amount for each customer. For some customers it would go up, and that wasn’t a problem, because we would grandfather them in. But for some customers it would plummet.

    There were two options for those customers:

    • Lower their prices according to the new plans and lose the revenue.
    • Don’t lower their prices and risk them being very angry about overpaying.

    Because we were a bootstrapped startup living month to month, every time we discussed this we would get stuck in a cycle of what-ifs one or the other situation. Eventually one day we made a rule of forbidding talking about pricing (trying to get some work done, because we would spend days and days discussing pricing).

    Eventually I found myself wishing that instead of starting with a high price and lowering it for experimentation, that we started with a low price and raising it for experimentation. We would have experimented much more. There’s another obvious solution which is not depend on the sweet revenue of those high prices. But even though it’s simple, I don’t think it’s easy… like sitting in front a pizza and not having a slide. Yeah… right!

    Next time I want to increment prices over time and even then try to give myself room for experimentation.

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  • Buying tools

    I have a few maxims when it comes to buying tools. One I heard from Adam Savage and I think he heard it from someone else. When buying a tool you haven’t used before:

    1. When buying a tool you haven’t used before, buy the cheapest possible working version. Not the toy one, but the next level up.
    2. Once you wear it down, break it, outgrow it, buy the most expensive one you can afford.

    The idea here is that the cheapest one will be enough to get you started and learning about the tool, maybe it’s the wrong tool, or maybe the path splits in two or maybe you end up just not using it that much. By the time you are done with the cheap one, you will have gain knowledge that lets you chose a better one.

    When you buy a better one, it’s cheaper to buy a for-life tool, than keeping buying it every now and then. At that point the extra quality might also be appreciated, specially around precision and accuracy.

    I recently had to choose which family of battery based tools to buy into. Generally when buying a tool, brand-loyalty is a liability, not an asset. Buy whichever tool matches you the best for your need for that tool, whether it’s quality or price. But when it comes to battery there’s an advantage in brand-loyalty because you can interchange batteries between your tools. It would be awesome if there was a standard of battery connectors but that will never happen.

    I’m a hobbyist and I do some home repair and DIY, so my demanding on tools is not that high. I do love quality but I found something that I love more than quality: variety. I’d rather have an OK drill and an OK stapler than a great drill. This actually happened recently and we bought the stapler and now we find so many uses for it. Having a large repertoire of tools helps find new paths, new projects, new ideas. When it comes to battery tools, I’d say, buy the cheapest ones that are good enough for you.

    Big caveat: if it’s for a job that has a fixed set of tools, then adding variety beyond the tools you need is worthless, so there you should ramp up quality instead.

    This was my decision with battery tools: the default is Ryobi, they are cheap but not too cheap and they have a great range of tools. If we outgrew a tool, for example, not enough power, or not enough resiliency, then we upgrade it to Makita and have two battery families, but no more than two. The decision on Makita is not final, I would probably reevaluate it when the time comes… so far Ryobi is performing really well.

  • I’m very proud of what I achieved at Wifinity

    Disclaimer: I’m blatantly tooting my own horn here because I’m proud of what I achieved, and very proud of what my team achieved. This is a personal story and a shout out to some awesome people.

    Today Jordan Bundy, someone I hired when I was at Wifinity sent all of us this message (pic included):

    Happy 1 year anniversary of getting the band together

    Jordan Bundy
    Part of the Wifinity team having dinner on our first get together.

    Today is the one year anniversary of the Wifinity software engineering team meeting face to face for the first time. I built this team completely distributed from the start and once I had the phase 1 complete, after months of being team mates but never having met, we had our first get together. Everyone was flown to London, where Wifinity is based, and we spent a week working, doing design/architecture, talking to all heads of departments, getting to know each other, and having geeky fun.

    Might have been the best business trip I’ve been on.

    Jordan Bundy

    What geeky fun? We all went to Bletchley Park to learn about code breaking during WWII and the birth of computers (where else?):

    On the day we all met, everybody was joking and talking as though we were old friends, like we knew each other already. I was ready to play host, to be the ice breaker, to work hard to make people comfortable… I ended up having to work hard to keep up instead. 

    At Wifinity I was in charge of all the technical aspects of a big Intellectual Property acquisition that had many moving parts that needed to come together in a 6 month program. We collectively wrote many hundreds of thousands of words of documentation that ended up being indexed, searched, tidied up and so on.

    The hardest part was probably migrating all of the servers from one company to another with minimal disruption to the wifi users. My goal was to have 100 or less complains and would have given us all a pat on the back for less than 10. In the end we got 0. Well… actually in the middle of the server transition we got 1 complaint, but turned out it was for a competitor service. That was pretty funny. A lot of credit for this migration goes to Chris Nash and Sam Whannel. If you need an SRE/DevOps/SysAdmin/SysOp type of person, you can’t go wrong with them.

    On the software development side the team did a marvelous job at taking over a very old code base with lots of technical debt, a lot of problems.

    Goran Jovic focused on security and he found some nerve wracking issues that we scrambled to fix. I remember internal conversations at Wifinity discussing pentesting; I think having Goran on the team was better than most pentesting.

    While we patched those security fixes, Rémi Sultan built an entirely new reusable authentication system that matched the needs of the company so that an entire class of bugs would be unlikely to ever happen again. He didn’t do it because it was on the roadmap but because he felt strongly about having a robust product, and he was correct.

    On the frontend side of things I had the pleasure of working with Grzegorz “Greg” Pabian. He’s an expert at many things. He was our resident Git wizard, teaching everybody the black arts of advance git and helping us when we got stuck with a broken branch. He could also have big-architecture thinking on the frontend so when he started re-writing and modernizing code, what he produced was a thing of beauty.

    Jordan Bundy also started on the frontend but it became clear to me that he’s a talented generalist. He didn’t stay on the frontend, he ventured into the backend and beyond, working with stakeholders. When I was leaving Wifinity, I recommended him to take over as manager of the team.

    And on the QA side of things I worked with Twayne Street. He’s good and fast at testing software. He would find so many rare bugs and his reports were so detailed and helpful. He started writing an automated testing system for Wifinity that looked pretty good. I really wish I would have seen it come to fruition.

    I’m very proud of what all of us achieved together at Wifinity and I miss working with this team a lot. I’d happily work with them again, and I know they would me; until then I’ve gained some very good friends. And I’m taking suggestions for our next nerdy venue. 

     

  • Good bye LastPass

    I’ve been using LastPass for 7 years or more and I have converted various business and people to use LastPass but that ended today. I’m a security minded person so I’m not abandoning passwords managers, just LastPass.

    A few days ago I woke up and my LastPass vault looked like this:

    That looks bad… I contacted support which took about a day to tell me “Oh, yeah, your Vault is corrupted, don’t worry about it, we logged you out and fixed it. Just log back in.”

    Pfiuuuu! I thought. That was a nerve wracking unproductive day, but at least LastPass support eventually showed up and fixed it…. NOPE!!!! It was still corrupt. I sent about 30 more emails to LastPass over a period of 4 days after that and I got no response.

    I did manage to revert my vault back to the last master password I used, which thankfully wasn’t changed so long ago so I didn’t lose that many passwords and also thankfully I still remember that master password. But this is completely unacceptable behavior from LastPass to a paying user, so that’s it, I’m done with LastPass.

    Any recommendations on password managers?

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  • How I started documenting at a new company

    I once got a job at a company that was acquiring a massive piece of intellectual property from another and it was my task to build a team to maintain and transition the knowledge as well as running assets (servers, databases, etc). The company that hired me had no relevant the documentation and the IP we were buying came with very little and all potentially obsolete. Everything was a matter of asking random people one after the other piecing together the puzzle until the answer was built. Oh… and I had 6 months to get it done.

    The process of starting to write documentation was very daunting, so I created a new type of document that I named “Exploration”. An exploration is frozen in time and describes something that happened, was found, discovered, figured out, etc. For example an exploration might say: “My boss asked me to add an account, I didn’t know we had accounts. I asked Johnny and he said Sally used to do it but she left. I asked my boss who replaced Sally and I was told to talk to Sam. Sam told me how he adds accounts, the steps are 1, 2, 3, 4. He doesn’t know what step 3 does but he knows that if you don’t do it, the account doesn’t work.”

    An exploration is frozen in time and describes something that happened, was found, discovered, figured out, etc.

    I bet I’m not the first one to come up with this concept, but I haven’t seen it anywhere. Have you?

    The goal of the explorations is to quickly form a written corpus of documentation about “How do we do things here?”. This allows you to depend less on people, which is very useful during transitions or turbulent periods where people might leave.

    One of the key aspects of explorations is that they are narrative, informal, and not necessarily high quality. It’s hard to write the manual so people don’t do it. Specially if it’s a big manual of which nothing is written. The exploration is a brain dump.

    Explorations should be stored in a centralized documentation system that’s easily searchable. My preference is Confluence (maybe using the blogging feature), the cool kids are using Notion these days. Stay away from Google Docs, because it promotes private copies and there’s no way of having a single tree or directory of documentation. Being able to easily search all explorations is very important and they should be searchable with the rest of the documentation.

    Explorations sometimes evolve into proper documentation, procedures that are maintained and live. When that happens, I often have a See Also section in the document that points to the explorations that influenced it and at the top of the explorations I add links to the document. It’s important to note that explorations are tier 2 documentation and it’s important that everybody knows it so that they are not taken as truth when read and are written liberally.

    The frequency at which explorations are created changes depending on what’s going on at the company, but generally people should be writing them any time they faced something puzzling. The way I do it is very simple: I constantly debrief with my team about what they did and after they told me the story of what happened, what they did, the workarounds and we have a good laugh, I almost always say: “Please, write an exploration about it”. It takes some effort to get started, but I think often people realize not having to remember things and just making brain dumps has a lot of value. Eventually they would just write explorations without me asking.

    Don’t expect explorations to have an immediate effect. It takes time to build a corpus of data that is worth searching for answers. It might take you a year to get there.

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  • A manager should multiply, not add

    If you are managing a team of people that are transporting rocks from A to B and you spend one hour picking ups rock from A and dropping them on B, you added one hour of work. If you spend that one hour procuring wheeled carts so that people don’t have to carry rocks on their backs, you increased their performance by 25% (and happiness). One task makes you an adder, one makes you a multiplier.

    And this is very semantically correct. If your team has 0 people, increasing 25% of 0 is still 0. Your effort was wasted.

    If you are a multiplier, the more people you manage, the more impact you have. That’s why often the compensation of a person at the top of a huge organization is so big (not to say that current CEO compensation is correct, that’s another story).

    I find this is a good heuristic to know if I’m working on the right thing as a manager. Am I adding or am I multiplying? Sometimes I have to add, but if all I do is add, am I a manager?

    The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.

    Andy Grove, High Output Management

    Something to keep in mind is that multiplying is hard. Well, it’s hard to find the opportunities when you can multiply. You need to sit down, look at the team carrying the stones, think about a better way, go find some carts, get a quote, evaluate it, run an experiment, see the increase in performance, discover not everyone knows what to do with it, write the manual and the training program, stop everyone from carrying stones (temporarily dropping productivity) so they can learn to use the wheeled carts.

    If as a manager you are so busy with interruption work that constantly lands on your lap, busy doing adding work, you will not have the time and mental space to think and find opportunities to multiply. This is why I don’t like the always-busy CEO or always-busy manager. When do they do their thinking?

    If you want to learn more about this I highly recommend Andy Grove’s High Output Management.

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  • Standups should be asynchronous

    Quick definition:

    A standup is a type of meeting commonly done in software development teams and now expanding to other knowledge working teams. During the standup meeting you say what you’ve done, what you are planning to do, and whether you need help or are blocked. Normally they happen daily and they are called standups because traditionally were supposed to stand up in front of your desk and just share with everyone else. The idea is that by standing up, people would be brief… that is often not the case (I worked at a place where standups would take between 20 to 60 minutes for about 6 people).

    The idea of the standup is that the whole team is on the same page, but in my opinion, most developers zone out until it’s their turn, they say their bit, and then they zone out again. The only person paying attention to everyone is the manager. And generally there’s nothing bad with that except that we are wasting people’s times.

    There’s a problem with the standup though, which is, at what time is it supposed to happen?

    • 9? too early for most developers
    • 10? ok for most, but those that show up at 9 will do nothing until the standup, because why bother getting in the zone if you are getting to get pushed out of it.
    • 11? now almost everybody spends most of the morning doing nothing because of the upcoming interruption
    • 12? just before lunch? maybe… at least people will keep it brief! But those that eat later will get annoyed by the interruption.
    • Any time in the afternoon? are we talking about today/tomorrow instead of yesterday/today? most people don’t plan tomorrow’s work and thus the what-will-you-do? part will be of low quality. Oh… and those that are not morning people will get their most productive time interrupted.

    The solution is very straightforward: asynchronous standup. People just give a brief report to the manager, but in a public space, about their plan for the day and what happened yesterday. I guess you could do it face to face, but that’s awkward. Text asynchronous standup are much better and they are friendly towards distributed work. They have a second advantage: track record.

    The standup is one of my most useful tools for management. I don’t expect members of the team to read each others report, but they are all public. If I notice a conflict or a potential synergy, I may ask someone to look at someone else’s report.

    If I don’t understand something, I drop a question. If someone has been working on the same thing every day for too long, specially if they mentioned they were close to finish, I have a chat with them (could be a task is problematic, blocked, a drop in performance, etc). If someone is planning on doing something that shouldn’t happen, I jump immediately.

    As a manager, it’s yet another opportunity for me to give encouragement to individual members of my team about their work, to thank them for doing the crappy tasks that nobody likes, etc. I sometimes push myself to do that, because otherwise the standup could start feeling like a useless bureaucracy, writing something that nobody ever reads, a thankless task. I want my team to know I’m reading it, paying attention, finding places to help, etc.

    I generally use Slack for text communication for my teams and my favorite app for asynchronous standups in Geekbot. It’s good if you are together, essential if you are distributed.

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