Homepage of Lucas Dohmen featuring a blog
If you need more context on why Rails needs a new leadership, here is David Celis summing it up a year ago , Paul Battley a few weeks ago , and—even though it is hard to believe—it even got worse since then. How could a fork even work? Rails is a huge code base and has multiple engineers who can invest significant work time into improving it. How could a few people fork and maintain it in their…
At 39c3 , Marc-Uwe Kling , together with the CCC , called for the Digital Independence Day : The idea is to use the first Sunday every month to reduce your personal dependence on big tech and billionaires . What I like about this approach is that it acknowledges that this is a process of many tiny steps and that a lot of people will need support. Hackerspaces in Germany will offer help to those…
Fonts are a critical part of web performance: Custom fonts can cause significant layout shifts, and their file size can be quite enormous. The fastest option is to bypass them completely by using web-safe fonts . However, a custom font can provide a lot of personality to a website, so many web designers consider them indispensable. So how can we make a font as small as possible to reduce its…
A question by my friend Bodo made me take another look at my podcast subscriptions. Maybe there is something interesting on my list for either Bodo or someone else. I’m listening to podcasts in both English and German (which are, coincidentally, the two languages I speak). I marked the German ones with the German flag, everything else is in English. News & Politics My weekly German news podcast…
With the release of Gnome 48, I asked myself the question: When will it be available in which distro? And this led me into a tiny rabbit hole that revealed a certain rhythm in the way desktop distros are released that I wanted to share here. GNOME has a pretty fixed release schedule, with a new version every March and September 1 . The two most used desktop distros (citation needed, but if you…
As I outlined in my previous post, I am currently using Fedora Silverblue on my personal notebook to try out an immutable Linux distribution. The most significant difference to my previous setup is how the command line experience changes. A huge part of my work is happening in terminals, so this is important to me. Installing Toolbx and Ptyxis Fedora Silverblue ships with Podman and Toolbx (both…
My friend mkhl told me about the initiative to turn Gnome OS into a general-purpose distro . This pushed all my buttons as it combined the excellent proposal by Lennart Poettering for an immutable distro with my favorite desktop environment, Gnome. At this point, Gnome OS is a bit too early stage for me, so I wanted to try out a similar approach for now and landed on Fedora Silverblue . Silverblue…
Due to a severe engine failure, our JavaScript engine has lost arrays. They are gone. With the help of historical usage of arrays, we will try to recover from this. Is it possible? Or will future generations need to live without arrays? In our historical notes, we find the following snippet: let list = []; list [ 0 ] = " hello " ; list [ 1 ] = " world " ; list [ 0 ]; // returns "hello" for ( let i…
Planning for Rails 8 has started . I assume it will be released at Rails World Toronto on September 26 and 27, 2024 (as a certain bruised ego would probably not release at RailsConf). This is a quick summary of what we can expect: Database-backed Jobs, Caching and Web Sockets Frontend Language Server and Formatting Smaller Changes Database-backed Jobs, Caching and Web Sockets Rails 8 will feature…
In this series of blog posts, we want to pull back the curtain on building web applications. In my experience, most developers use a framework and application server and do not look behind the curtain to see what happens inside of them. Frameworks are great for making development quicker and more comfortable, providing abstractions for low-level details and recurring patterns. But there’s always…