I'm currently building an MVP for a startup, solo. We've got Postgres pulling triple duty as the go-to database for all normal relational data, a vector database with pgvector, and a job queue (With the magic of SELECT ... FROM "Jobs" WHERE ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED LIMIT 1). Every time I go out looking for solutions to problems it feels like the world really wants me to get a dedicated vector store or to use Redis as a job queue.

Back when I was a Rails developer a good majority of the ActiveJob implementers used Redis. Now that I'm doing NodeJS the go-to is Bull which can only serialize jobs to Redis. They back this with claims that I can scale to thousands of jobs per second! I have to assume this theoretical throughput benefit from using Redis is utilized by 0.01% of apps running Bull.

So I ended up implementing a very simple system. Bull wouldn't have been a good fit anyway as we have both Python and Typescript async workers, so a simple system that I fully understand is more useful at the moment. I'm curious who else shares my philosophy.

Edit: I'll try to remember to update everyone in a year with the real world consequences of my design choices.

I moved to a place with an "actual" winter just over a decade ago -- snow, freezing temperatures, etc. In the first couple of years, I got what felt like a genuinely solid winter. Lots of blisteringly cold days. Snow that fell in large amounts and stuck around for most of the season. I love winter, so this was great for me.

In recent years, however, the winters have been milder and milder. When we do get snow, it's only around for a bit because days above freezing are now frequent enough that it's able to melt between snowfalls. Also, the snowfalls themselves are more intermittent. This year specifically we've actually had more rain than snow. I don't remember getting rain in January when I first moved here.

It irks me a bit because the shift has been so stark and noticeable in such a short period of time. There's a part of me that thinks that it's not a big deal and maybe my first years here were unnaturally cold and snowy for the area, so what I'm seeing now is simply the other side of the mean, but then there's another part of me that feels like that's simply a comforting lie I can tell myself in the face of the obvious effects of climate change.

Is there anyone else here that feels like they're missing their winters?

Inspired by this amazing post and the subsequent discussion about the need for more queer joy:

What's a recent queer milestone you've reached/experienced in your life?

It can be something big, but it can also be something small but still meaningful. It can be an event (coming out!), a realization (oh so THAT'S who I am!), a feeling (dress go spinny!), a moment (holding hands!), a recognition (they used male pronouns!), or anything else that is distinctly queer and noteworthy.

Share what it is, what you think about it, and why it's meaningful.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Final movie for January is Brad Bird's animated The Iron Giant from 1999.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.

The schedule for February is:

• 5th: Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
• 12th: The Aviator
• 19th: Batman Begins
• 26th: Gangs of New York

This is Album of the Week #18 ~ This week's album is Canserbero - Muerte

Year of Release: 2012
Genre(s): Conscious Hip Hop
Country: Venezuela
Length: 70 minutes
RYM | Listen! (Album.Link)

RYM review by ligetifan137:

When you go to Venezuela, caserbero is everywhere you go. His mark not only on the Venezuelan rap scene but worldwide is so tangible it's almost impossible to process he is gone. The power with which he delivers each line, with so much anger as he describes such raw descriptions of daily venezuelan life is haunting, it's so poetic yet so realistic. He was very well read, which can be seen all through out the numerous references of various thinkers as well as laying a very grim philosophical and political groundwork present all around Venezuela. The concept of this album functions perfectly, each song flows so nicely and feels very natural. Even though the beats can be a but repetitive and under produced, they are so overshadowed by his performance you almost forget they're there: it's as if he's speaking to you face to face. A legend to many, gone too soon. Rest in peace

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

Hey folks of tildes,

I wanted to see if anyone has similar experiences as mine and if they know the reason for this. I've purchased a few items which came with AAA battery pre-installed (Chromecast from Google, Weighing scale from Xiaomi). These batteries lasted for an incredibly long time, Chromecast lasted over 1.5 years and Xiaomi's scale lasted for a similar time. Any third party battery I've purchased (Energizer, Duracell, Panasonic, Eveready and few others which I can't recall) last for a couple months at best.

I've now switched to rechargeable batteries, to reduce the waste I was creating. Still, I was really curious if anyone has a similar experience, and if they know the reason for it.

I'm wondering if this type of tool exists. Basically, I am senior dev of a 3 man dev team at a non-tech company. I maintain 60 or so web apps for our 300-400 users (all internal apps) as well as act as jack of all trades when it comes to SQL, IIS, self hosted and cloud hosted windows server boxes, VMware, etc. Basically, I have a lot of spinning plates.

We are in active development but we get interrupted a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Because of this, we don't really work based on deadlines but more on timelines. Upper management knows that things get priority over other things and we have to move things around and pivot a lot, so as long as we can explain why a project took 6 more months than we projected, it's fine.

So having said all that, I'm looking for a timeline system similar to gantt but I want the ability to have more than one "timespan" per task/row.

So for example let's say I'm building a to-do app and one of the tasks is to figure out the theme/color scheme of the app. I think this will take 3 days, and I don't really need to be more specific than that, they aren't trying to micro manage. However, I got interrupted and pulled off the project in the middle of that task, so I worked on it for 1 day, I had other things for 3 days, and I came back to finish the last two days.

In this case, in a gantt chart, your task can only be one "timespan" per "row" and in order for me to chart what actually happened, I need to add multiple subtasks to that task and the task ends up taking 3 rows of space.

This is rough to read and annoying to have to rearrange and insert new subtasks and rearrange subsequent tasks along the timeline.

Is there a tool out there that handles this more "ad-hoc" scheduling that I'm looking for?

Ideally what I would like is for me to be able to put together a full estimate of time for the project (say 3 months) with the ability to cascade schedule changes down when a task in the middle goes on longer than expected or gets interrupted.

I would like to have categories or color mapping so we can see which timespans are interruptions and which are tasks done and tasks to do.

Am I asking too much? Does gantt have this ability and I've not found the right vendor?

Right now my temporary solution is excel but it's a beating to have to go shift things every time I have an interruption, I feel like I spend more time explaining what happened than I do actually programming, haha

Edit: I've seen things like Monday.com and Microsoft project, but these are really heavy and too specific for my needs, I don't want a lot of context or setting up a kanban board or anything like that, I just want effectively an interactive timeline with simple "I'm doing this for x days" and not much else in terms of percent complete, details of the task, sprint integration, etc.

Think trello in complexity, just time-based and sideways 😅

I don't want to be a project manager, I don't have time for that - I just need the ability to quickly track interruptions and be able to use it as backup if upper management comes poking around

It seems to me we teach kids math in a way that prioritizes mass teaching and resource management over the actual learning of mathematical concepts.

We rely on paper and pencil, and maybe some limited manipulatives like unit blocks, and there’s 1 teacher for every 15-30 kids or so.

What are some methods that might work better to establish a strong understanding of math if we were able to approach it differently?

Or what are some methods that have been proven to work in other settings and why are they able to be successful?