TWIL January 23rd 2026

• The Ruby OpenTelemetry gem does not accept symbols as keys or values for attributes
  • One part of a library automatically converting symbols to keys before passing them on does not mean other parts do
• Honeycomb has a meta.refinery.reason attribute telling you which rule was used to sample the trace
• FieldList in Refinery is all the keys whose values will be used to construct the sampling key
  • So if there's a sampling_fields attribute in there, don't pass keys to it. Doesn't magically merge them into the FieldList, it uses them as (constant) values in the sampling key which do nothing but make it longer.
• From the Tokyo Rubyist Meetup, which was a coding challenge this time, I learned there's a reason I TDD most things
  • Writing the whole solution then running it for the first time was certainly a decision of all time
• Finally found a chance to use git bisect
  • unfortunately not git bisect run because I (thought I) needed to run bundle install && bundle exec rspec, which didn't wait for the installs to finish before running tests
  • extra unfortunately it didn't work because there's just something messed up with my local, another dev ended up solving the problem
  • but I can definitely see how it'd be useful now I've used it
• Tests on one of our repos have apparently been making calls to staging for quite some time!?!

Links

• The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button - Paul Herbert

I've heard a lot of good things about shadcn but this is horrifying. Makes me question the validity of any other opinion from the people who claim it's worth using. Why do you need so much code and complexity to render a radio button?!?.

• Lowering the specificity of multiple rules at once - Manuel Matuzović

This is what I want to do with a work project we use to share styles across multiple projects, maybe linking it here will remind me to finish that work some time.