Souls Like Strings

The Midsolar Murders by Mur Lafferty.

Imagine being so good at solving murders people just keep dying around you so you can solve more.

Just a fun series. You'd think a setting with wasp hive minds, sentient space stations and living rocks which turn into spaceships by drinking the blood of their enemies would be all about the world-building but it's the characters that're the focus here. There still is plenty of quality wordbuilding, it's just relegated to the background where it effectively serves as interesting color rather than requiring you to think too hard about its...

• You can give buttons values in Rails
  • Actually I kinda knew this from seeing 'Submit' in params a bunch of times
  • but never considered using it to save as a draft or not for example
• SQL really cares about trailing commas
• Microservices make testing annoying (again)
  • This time because FDW tables are obviously not available if the 'Foreign' part isn't
  • So had to find and update a test stub SQL file which creates them as regular local tables
• Making a way to configure things through an admin UI can save a lot of...

The End of Everything by Katie Mack.

Quantum nihlism

This was pretty interesting! I'd heard of a few of these theories from random Reddit posts, but the book obviously goes into much more depth and provides some science to back the theories up. I've soured on pop-sci a bit since in hindsight most of the stuff I've read is either pushing the author's political agenda or just has a lot of stuff made up to be more interesting, but this neatly sidesteps the issue by being about stuff which won't happen for billions upon billions of years....

A bit too much lamp-rubbing in this one

Why

• Bright & colorful vibe is a nice contrast to many metroidvanias
• Has a lot of personality, even if not familiar with the (apparently established) characters
• Mostly chill & breezy gameplay...

Why Not

• ...but towards the end RNG takes a bit too much of a role
• Progression gates can be a little adventure-gamey at times
• The biome where every female character ends up in a Slave Leia costume wasn't strictly necessary

Impressions

I may not have finished it, but the 70%ish I did play of Shantae...

• Working at a bigger company leads to questions like
  • Do we need separate privacy policies for some clients?
  • Do we need separate privacy policies for specific features?
  • How do we track whether a user accepted a client's privacy policy?
  • How do we manage versioning privacy policies, and tracking which version a user accepted?
• head_object from the S3 Ruby SDK lets you check if an object exists in a bucket without actually retrieving the object
• You can't (without some application-side logic) roll back an S3 bucket without enabling S3 versioning
  • But you can use object lifecycles...