postgres got so many great updates over the years, but why is it still so hard to reclaim disk space...

(postgres databases tend to keep growing in size, even if you delete lots of data)

For the last couple of days, transactional emails from my
#rails app have been sent through my own SMTP service.

A dumb idea overall, but it seems to work (most of the time 😅)!

Spamhaus' approach to API is really interesting.

They use DNS as a key-value store. Need to lookup an IP or domain? Just check the TXT record for
<domain>.​dbl.​spamhaus​.org to see if it's listed as a spam domain.

It's super fast and pretty much every email service uses it.

As with spam mitigation, services like Cloudflare address real problems (DDoS), but the flip side is that they gradually take control of a large chunk of traffic, effectively becoming the gatekeepers of your browsing.

Then you're in a captcha limbo, trying to convince a robot that you're human.

Imagine having to ask Cloudflare for permission to visit a website.

That's what happened when we handed email over to 3-5 big players. Now we have a decentralized standard that's dead, because delivering (legitimate) email independently is no longer attainable.

We're on the same path with http&CF.

includes() in #rails has become a source of weird bugs in my app recently.

Don't know if it's always been there or if sth changed recently, but it produces a weird, gigantic SQL that ends up loading incorrect data. Especially when combined with joins().

Use preload() instead.

The perils of ORMs.

Everyone says running your own SMTP relay is a stupid idea. I wanted to try anyway:

- built a SMTP server in Go*
- set it up to relay emails from Rails
- and forward incoming emails to Rails
- got blacklisted on Spamhaus for testing gmail error responses

👇

hi, bsky