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In September 2018 I switched job to work as a remote consultant for a small UK company. Without a work computer, I considered buying a Mac for the following reasons:

• Ruby development in Windows is a pain
• I like the UNIX environment
• The overall user experience, I believed, was top-notch

The other option would have been Linux, but my experiences of macOS had, until that point, been better than my experiences of Linux.

Figuring that I’d want about five years out of the machine, and having worked for too long on too-slow Macs, I dropped € 3,200 (~ $3,719 at the time) on a high-spec 15-inch Macbook Pro¹.

Over the past few months, I’ve been on a bit of a journey through different OSes¹, desktop environments, apps, and even editors. Ultimately I settled on Arch Linux + KDE Plasma + Neovim, but I ended up with some different ideas along the way.

One such idea was to ditch tmux and simply use a modern, more featureful terminal emulator. I primarily used tmux for splitting “windows” and its scrollback buffer, but it contributed another layer of abstraction to debug when things like performance, colour support, or displaying images became a problem. Meanwhile, almost any modern terminal emulator can do splits and scrollback buffers.

So I settled on Konsole, which supports all that I need and some other niceties (like ligatures). I set up my key bindings to create splits similarly to those I used in Tmux, and… immediately missed a feature of my tmux setup. This was the ability to switch between tmux panes and vim splits using the same key combination, as though they were in fact the same thing.

Ruby 2.7.0 added numbered block parameters. There was some controversy which resulted in the initial syntax of @n changing to _n. I like the change.

This is what it looks like:

# regular named params
HASH.map { |a, b| [a, b] }

# new numbered params
HASH.map { [_1, _2] }

Anyway, I wondered if there was any performance impact in this change so I threw together a quick benchmark. Result: it’s just as fast as named params.

Update: This post originally benchmarked against Xsv v0.3.2, but many performance changes (particularly to memory) were made, so I’ve now benchmarked against v0.3.7 and updated accordingly.

TL;DR: Xsv was ~5 times faster than alternatives at parsing the XLSX file I benchmarked it against, allocating the fewest objects and memory, making it by far the least resource-intensive of all benchmarked gems.

When exporting data for general use, we in the industry are likely to reach for CSV files; they’re basically plain-text, but with a sort-of agreed-upon structure — well, there is RFC 4180 but Wikipedia agrees that implementations are inconsistent at best.

I previously wrote about this topic, but it involved generating a special SSH key and adding that to git config. One day I realised I could just use agent forwarding, so here’s the process.

Assuming Hass.io, install the official SSH Server addon and add your public key the config.

Now let’s init our git repo and reset it to the remote config.