We know we all stay on the cutting edge of Rails; no one, and I mean no one out there is making a 4.2 -> 5.2 upgrade because Rails 4.2 is no longer supported.
You, dear reader, have just suddenly found an interest in resolving deprecation warnings, and as one jumps a few Rails versions in short order, finding and resolving them systematically will save you a lot of time.
Sure, you could run tail -f log/test.log | grep "DEPRECATION WARNING", but that’s not systematic. If the same line of code gets called 50 times, and prints a deprecation warning each time, that generates a lot of noise, not much signal.
Most of us don’t get enough sleep, and are worse for it. Usually when the topic of sleep comes up, I say
Hey, there’s this great book I read on sleep. You should read it, and then sleep more…
The people most in need of more sleep are also usually the people most unable to make time to read a book about sleep. So, here’s an effort to help these people save time, prioritize sleep, and then maybe give the book a read anyway.
I hope to use this post to accomplish two things:
Convince you that sleep is massively important and you should sleep more
Convince you to read the book. If you find anything below compelling, you’ll find it even more compelling if you read the whole book yourself.
Everything that follows is a quote from Why We Sleep.
If I add my own comments, they’ll be inline and italicized, like this:
Josh: here’s a comment I’m adding
Index
I’ve quoted from this book, extensively. I don’t recommend reading this post top-to-bottom, but rather jumping around the post, from this following index, to a section that looks interesting, then going back to the top, jumping to a different section, etc.
Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.
This is the grab-bag of negative impacts on sleeping too little. From the first chapter. The author expands on all of these points later in the book.
Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.
Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Inadequate sleep — even moderate reductions for just one week — disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.
Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure.
Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
Perhaps you have also noticed a desire to eat more when you’re tired? This is no coincidence. Too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry while suppressing a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction. Despite being full, you still want to eat more. It’s a proven recipe for weight gain in sleep-deficient adults and children alike.
Worse, should you attempt to diet but don’t get enough sleep while doing so, it is futile, since most of the weight you lose will come from lean body mass, not fat.
Add the above health consequences up, and a proven link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.
The old maxim “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is therefore unfortunate. Adopt this mind-set, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.
A while back, sometime in 2017, I wrote this tweet:
a while ago, I read about how to keep well-organized notes on a range of topics. Here's my current notebook, indexed by category: pic.twitter.com/aVsNnGPEpd
Since then, I occasionally have conversations with people, about how we all handle taking notes in physical notebooks. Rather than wrestling with a web browser to find this one specific tweet, I’ll just drop everything I have to say on the topic into this post.
After encountering this “indexing” method, I’m a firm convert to the value of organizing paper notes in this fashion. It helps me get very dense notes in my notebook, and it’s easy for me to organize my notes by topic, rather than in chronological order.
Here’s my current stash of “indexed” notebooks:
All of these notebooks are full of notes, and they’re all indexed.
Mostly, I talk about indexes with Turing students, getting ready to dive deep into technical topics. A single lesson might reference a new keyboard shortcut for their code editor, a novel way of using Git, several new methods in a given programming language, and more.
Rather than stick all of those on a page marked with the current date (and being unable to quickly look up the Git commands next time I break something with it) I’d just add each new piece of information to a page specific to the topic.
If I didn’t have a page specific to the topic, I’d flip ahead of the first empty page in my notebook, add the topic to the top of the page, and then add that new topic to the front of my notebook, in the index:
My very first Turing notebook (this single notebook lasted me about half of the program
Lets dig a bit deeper into the git index item (the very first item, top of the page in the picture)
Each of those small black lines marks another page of notes about Git.
Here’s ‘git’ the index, and you can see that I have at least four pages of notes on git, scattered throughout my notebook
The first run was pretty brutal. It took (what felt like) forever, and I was not content with my solution.
Even better, it passed the test cases given while building the solution, but failed on submission.
So, once I fixed it so it didn’t fail on submission… it then timed out. My code was so inefficient leetcode’s test suite took too long to finish.
I have a few learning objectives for doing this kind of code challenge:
Improve my knowledge of Ruby’s API
Get better at benchmarking code “snippets”.
Refresh/document my “process” for learning new things about a programming language, for the benefit of Turing students who are attacking their own code challenges.
The challenge and my (not quite working) solution.
Here’s the given instructions:
You are given an array of strings words and a string chars.
A string is good if it can be formed by characters from chars (each character can only be used once).
Return the sum of lengths of all good strings in words.
Example 1:
Input: words = ["cat","bt","hat","tree"], chars = "atach"
Output: 6
Explanation:
The strings that can be formed are "cat" and "hat" so the answer is 3 + 3 = 6.
Example 2:
Input: words = ["hello","world","leetcode"], chars = "welldonehoneyr"
Output: 10
Explanation:
The strings that can be formed are "hello" and "world" so the answer is 5 + 5 = 10.
Note:
1 <= words.length <= 1000
1 <= words[i].length, chars.length <= 100
All strings contain lowercase English letters only.
As I explained in that post, I find it helpful to do a ‘deep dive’ on some of the books I want to be deeply influenced by. For a variety of reasons, I have a tolerably high degree of physical fitness. I’d like to retain this fitness for a long time. Much of the fitness equation is “don’t have extra body fat”, so to that end, I’ve been doing reading on the topic.
Given how prevalent being overweight or obese is in our society, the small investment of reading a few books that might point one towards a proper course of action has ludicrously high returns.
Notes on formatting
I will be freely interjecting my thoughts throughout the rest of this review. When I quote the author, it will be denoted like such:
These are words the author has written
Sometimes they’ll extend for several paragraphs
I may choose to italicize or make bold portions of the quotations from the books. In general, these are my decisions, not the author’s.
If there are
[words wrapped in brackets]
it’s me editorializing to load the context of the quote.
My collected notes from Why we get fat: and what to do about it
Getting fat is not a “calories-in/calories-out” problem, or “eat too much, exercise too little” problem. It’s a hormonal regulation problem.
In honor of the laws of thermodynamics that they’re replacing, we’ll call these the laws of adiposity. The First Law:
Body fat is carefully regulated, if not exquisitely so.
This is true even though some people fatten so easily that it’s virtually impossible to imagine.
What I mean by “regulated” is that our bodies, when healthy, are working diligently to maintain a set amount of fat in our fat tissue — not too much and not too little — and that this, in turn, is used to assure a steady supply of fuel to the cells.
The implication (our working assumption) is that if someone gets obese it’s because this regulation has been thrown out of whack not that it’s ceased to exist.
All of these notebooks are full of notes, and they’re all indexed.
My very first Turing notebook (this single notebook lasted me about half of the program
Here’s ‘git’ the index, and you can see that I have at least four pages of notes on git, scattered throughout my notebook