Mastodawn

We often talk about the scouting rule of “always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it”, or in a software context “always leave the code a little bit better than you found it”.

If you see duplication in the code, then remove that before you leave the method. If you see poor variable names then fix those before you leave.

What we don’t talk about as much is how a culture of branching and Pull Requests (PR’s) actively discourages making small changes for that purpose. If I want to rename a method to make it clearer and know that making that little change is going to require real effort to go through a review process and manual merges, then I’m more likely to decide to just live with the original name, even if it is is poor.

Whereas if I can make that little refactoring and directly check it into mainline then it’s a very low effort change that contributes to the quality of the product. It’s become easy to do the right thing.

How many things do we have like this, that actively discourage us from doing the right thing?

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Tomáš Janoušek Jun 3

Ideally those socket/cookie files should be in /run (which is tmpfs and thus the noatime from my root filesystem doesn't apply) and this wouldn't be a problem. Can I convince them to change it though, given how weird my setup is?

But then, can I convince myself to stop using /tmp for random crap?

Or shall I perhaps just revert to the default relatime (which updates atime at least once a day, avoiding the problem)? Is noatime still relevant in 2025?

Tomáš Janoušek Jun 3

TIL chromium + systemd-tmpfiles + noatime are not friends.

For the last few years, whenever the browser reached approximately a month of uptime, new invocations would fail to open a new window/tab and instead launch a new instance, with both instances fighting for locks on the databases (bookmarks, tabs, cookies, …). I never bothered to check the exact timing, and attributed it to having installed an update in the meantime, but it was mildly annoying.

Now I think I know what’s going on:

my /tmp is not tmpfs (systemd/debian default these days) because I like to put stuff there and have it survive a reboot
I configured tmpfiles to clean files 30+ days old
noatime results in the chromium socket/cookie being considered old

Tomáš Janoušek May 17

Jack Linke 🦄May 17

"When you help people, they also then help people... It's a pyramid scheme I want to introduce you to." - Cristián Maureira-Fredes

Honestly, this is the only MLM I want to be part of!

#PyConUS

Tomáš Janoušek May 15

Neil Brown May 15

Hello, lovely fedi authors

Please help me buy your books!

I love buying books. But if you are only selling your ebooks via Amazon, then I can no longer buy your books :(

I want to give you my money. But if I can't download the book for which I have paid and move it to my eReader (Amazon has now blocked this), then I can't read your book, so I can't buy your book.

Strong preference for a paid ePub without DRM your own store, please!

#books #bookstodon #author

Tomáš Janoušek Apr 5

Hans_Olo Apr 5

Schon mal einen 16 Bit Hund gesehen?

Tomáš Janoušek Apr 5

Confession time.

I have a spreadsheet for cheap beer. Columns are days of week. Rows are local brewery taprooms. Cells are what sort of happy hour deal they have. Most days have at least one £4 for a pint deal, except Saturday.

RE: https://glitterkitten.co.uk/@babe/114281593763979447