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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

@jbranchaud.bsky.social

1.2K followers 370 following 1.4K posts

Free-Range Software Dev and Consultant ✨ PostgreSQL • Ruby on Rails • TypeScript • React ✨ 🏃🐈🍹🎱 (he/him) | Chicago | Work with me: visualmode.dev

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · Nov 15

The Ruby language and community have given me so much, so I thought I'd give a little something back as #RubyConf wraps.

Introducing Ruby Operator Lookup!

A one-stop directory for all the operators and symbols you'll see in Ruby programs. There are sooo many 😅

www.visualmode.dev/ruby-operators

Screenshot with a heading "Ruby Operator Lookup" and subheading "and lots of special character syntax as well". There is a search box for searching through the operators and then a couple dozen buttons each displaying different operators and special characters.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 11h

We have a crossword puzzle book that we take on road trips, camping, and other kinds of travel.

Whenever we complete a puzzle, we write the date, who contributed, and a note about where we are and what we're up to.

It's fun to flip back through and reminisce.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 1d

I use the equivalent of this syntax in Ruby all the time. It’s a nice pattern.

Seb ⚛️ ThisWeekInReact.com @sebastienlorber.com · 1d

TIL about the JS "Declarations in Conditionals" proposal

This lets you write const/let inside if/while block

Curious, would you use this?
I think I like it, could make code slightly less verbose and still explicit

(TC39 stage 1, will be presented for stage 2 next week)

github.com/tc39/proposa...

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve got to figure out a space heater for my office. HVAC isn’t pushing enough warm air into that room.

I like the idea of the oil-filled radiator style — slower but more energy efficient.

Their top pick (Vornado) sounds nice tho 🤔

www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/r...

The Best Space Heaters

Warm up a room and boost your home’s heating system with space heaters we’ve tested firsthand.

www.nytimes.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 1d

Pretty cool that MacOS has a built-in command that you invoke. from the CLI to tell your display and system to not go to sleep — useful if you have stuff running and then go to grab some lunch.

github.com/jbranchaud/t...

github.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 1d

Chicago Weather: always overpromising and underdelivering.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2d

Incredible — I would have never imagined @chess.com doing a brand collab with old school RuneScape.

Reposted by 🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 2d

“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.”

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.

Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again.

An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next.

Understand what it is to pray in Chicago.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 5d

“Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start”

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 7d

The way this Hammerspoon automation works is that I manually trigger it with `Cmd+Opt+Ctrl-s` and it looks at the front Chrome window, goes through all the tabs not in the "keep list", writes them to a timestamped entry in a JSON file, and then closes all those tabs.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 8d

🎉 Super proud to have hit the 5 year mark of VisualMode and being an independent software developer.

I continue to work with great clients on challenging projects. In particular I’m enjoying some recent modern Rails apps — this stack still has a big future.

www.visualmode.dev

VisualMode - Small-batch software development and consulting

Your business is built on software. You need that software to run like a well-oiled machine so that you can keep moving forward. VisualMode can help. We bring cross-discipline, full-stack expertise to...

www.visualmode.dev

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 8d

One of my worst habits is feeling too precious about my Chrome tabs and never closing them until there are dozens or even 100+.

Wanting to give Hammerspoon (MacOS scripted automation tooling) a spin, I figured this would be a good task to take on.

Here's ChromeTabSaver!

github.com/jbranchaud/d...

github.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 9d

One of my all-time favorite albums — Daft Punk’s Alive 2007

Holding up the vinyl album for Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 — with a record player, old radio, and money tree in the background.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 9d

Intel MBP running Rails app unit test suite: 2min 23sec
M4 Max MBP running Rails app unit test suite: 12sec

Wowow 🤩🏎️

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 10d

Meme from Nightmare Before Christmas where the mayor says "There's only 365 days left til next Halloween!" and the wolf man corrects him, "364!"

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 11d

The *checks* described in the `strong_migrations` README contains a lot of examples of when you may need to use that pattern. Reading through it is a great way to build up an intuition for these things.

github.com/ankane/stron...

GitHub - ankane/strong_migrations: Catch unsafe migrations in development

Catch unsafe migrations in development. Contribute to ankane/strong_migrations development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 11d

If you want to do *online* database schema migrations without degrading the performance of your system, the Expand and Contract Pattern is a great approach. And generally a great pattern to know about.

www.prisma.io/dataguide/ty...

Using the expand and contract pattern | Prisma's Data Guide

In this article, we introduce the expand and contract pattern to help migrate data and clients to a new schema.

www.prisma.io

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 12d

Extremely cool to hear that someone recommended it 😊

That's a great idea. I'll see if I can figure out how to add that to the search and/or just add additional links for those that go to the % page.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 12d

I finally figured out that in VSCode/Cursor, if I hit cmd+p and type out the name of a file I want to create, I'll eventually filter everything else out and have a single option to create that file and the intervening directories if necessary.

Screenshot showing the Cursor "File Quick Finder" with the name of a non-existent file typed out. It says "No matching results" and then below that is an action to "Create File".

Reposted by 🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

MisterJayEm @misterjayem.bsky.social · 12d

*because of terrorism

Chicago Tribune @chicagotribune.com · 12d

Commentary: Just six months ago, my daughter would beg me for cotton candy from one of the after-school vendors, and we’d stay on the playground a little longer before heading home. Now, the vendors are gone, the playground is closed and the small routines have quietly disappeared because of fear.

Allison Pleas: Fear of ICE is stealing the simple moments in my Chicago neighborhood

The environment around my daughter’s predominantly Latino school has changed: The vendors are gone and the playground is closed.

trib.al

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Reposted by 🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 12d

No one should have to put up with this shit but in particular kids should not have to put up with this shit

Block Club Chicago @blockclubchi.bsky.social · 12d

Indoor trick-or-treat events. Candy dropoffs. Neighbors patrolling with whistles.

This is how Chicagoans are helping kids have a safe and ICE-free Halloween this year: blockclubchi.co/47qJSzi.

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Reposted by 🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

shawn @mulchy.bsky.social · 12d

heartbreaking and infuriating

“They choked me very hard and then they punched me in the eye, all while asking me why am I resisting when I was not resisting at all,” he said. They then knocked him to the ground and put him in handcuffs.

In the end, federal agents took the entire family into custody: Arnoldo Carrillo Jr., his father, Rosario; his mother, Martha; his 24-year-old sister, Sarai and their 14-year-old brother Eli. Arnoldo and Sarai were both released. Rosario, Martha and Eli are still in custody.

While Arnoldo and his siblings are all U.S. citizens born and raised in Indiana, their parents do not have legal status. Martha, who has an expired visa, was sent to the ICE facility in suburban Broadview, but has since been sent to a facility in El Paso, Texas. Rosario, who is undocumented, is being held at the Hammond, Indiana Police Department.

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Reposted by 🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

armando l sanchez @mandophotos.bsky.social · 14d

Border Patrol officers stand outside their vehicles at a gas station near Bridgeport Tuesday in Chicago. Earlier in the day students from Little Village Lawndale High School held a walk out to protest recent immigration enforcement actions in the area.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14d

I'm finding I like my tooling way better when I make (Neo)Vim act more like an IDE than when I make an IDE act more like (Neo)Vim.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15d

And PR opened -- would ya look at me contributing to open-source 😅

github.com/nebulab/erb-...

fix: account for utf-8 multi-codepoint text by jbranchaud · Pull Request #81 · nebulab/erb-formatter

This addresses the bug reported in Issue #80

github.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 16d

I know a big part of this is probably due to not having 200 chrome tabs open (yet), but the difference in battery life between my 2020 Intel MBP and this new M4 MBP is astounding.