learn-ruby VS Mastodon

More consistent learning. The job search also gave me a chance to get back to my Ruby/web development learning roadmap. I realized that at my last job, I wasn't consistently spending time improving my skills, outside of whatever I might (if I was lucky) be learning in work projects. It's just hard to fight against the pressure of the day-to-day work. Here are some approaches that I'll try this time around: Disregard immediate applicability and learn something I'm interested in for the sake of expanding my mind. Right now that's learning functional programming. Learn actively, whether by contributing to Exercism's Ruby track, building a collection of Ruby code katas, or maybe even creating a text-based game.

Beyond these basics, I've put together a list of my favorite Ruby/Rails learning resources.

I made the Git list by (1) scouring the Web for recommended resources, then (2) trying out each one to see if it would be worth going through to the end. In case you're curious about which resources didn't make the cut, here's the commit where they are removed.

As a guide to my reflections today, I'll use my "Learning Ruby" roadmap, which originally arose out of the chaos of my bookmark hell, where I was having trouble keeping track of the actually important learning resources. The roadmap worked well for me and eventually I put it up on GitHub because making it public gives me more motivation to keep making progress.

For me, Ruby was a great choice for a career change. I used to be a teacher until I quit in 2020, then over the next 1.5 years I studied and practiced part-time, while working full-time in a remote customer support job. Ever since I started learning Ruby, I've saved my favorite learning resources here: https://github.com/fpsvogel/learn-ruby. Many of them are free.

So I've set out to explore the problem of organizing business logic from more angles than before, using the resources listed below. These lists are excerpted from my "Learning Ruby" road map which I often update, so you may want to find these lists there if this post is old at the time of your reading it. The sections corresponding to the lists below are, at the time of writing, "Rails architecture" and "Rails codebases".

For more resources, here's my list of my favorites: https://github.com/fpsvogel/learn-ruby

I'll tell my story and you can decide if it resonates with you at all. Also these might help you: my Ruby roadmap (favorite learning resources), and my blog post "How to find your first Rails job".

I've made a big list of my favorite learning resources, but here are some possible first steps:

I actually don't know of a good "beyond the basics" Rails course. The one or two that I've seen out there are prohibitively expensive. For me the best way forward has been to improve in specific areas, such as OOP, testing, and SQL basics. I've made a list of my favorite resources in each area, which might help you.

Oh, TIL about https://mastodon.social/ (https://joinmastodon.org/)

Looks like what you describe, doesn't it?

> Social networking that's not for sale.

Interestingly there is some discussion for Mastodon with people asking the limit to be smaller, which raises the question as to the purpose of alt text, and how to properly handle larger text lengths in screen reader programs.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12268

Through the Fast Forward program, we give free services and support to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. We support many of the world’s top programming languages (like Python, Rust, Ruby, and the wonderful Scratch), foundational technologies (cURL, the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, OpenStreetMap), and projects that make the internet better and more fun for everyone (Inkscape, Mastodon, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Terms of Service; Didn’t Read).

Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.

Postmortem on what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=39305884

The v1 API of Mastodon limits the size of the tree that it will expand for users who are not logged into the server: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/controllers/api/v1/statuses_controller.rb . I am guessing that this or some similar limit applies to threads being returned to unauthenticated users of the web UI. It just arbitrarily stops expanding the replies at some point, including the main thread from the OP.

If a thread is truncated, users expect it to expand automatically and autoscroll when you hit the bottom. In my desktop browser, that does not occur, and there is no indication that there is more to see. This is the situation of the web interface as of Mastodon version 4.2.5.

The issue is very sensitive to observer conditions. If you are logged into the server, the behavior is different. If you use a Mastodon app instead of the web, the behavior might be different. As the tree expands, the cutoffs become different. If you look at the thread on a different Mastodon server, the tree is different because every server has its own view of the Fediverse.

HN needs a best practice for linking to Mastodon threads in a way that provides a consistent experience to HN readers. The average Mastodon server would be crushed by hundreds of HN readers grabbing the entirety of a huge thread all at once, so this might involve some thread-unroll-and-cache service. I tried https://mastoreader.io/ but it did not solve the problem.

Alternately, we push changes into the Mastodon web UI to warn users when they need to click to see more and assume that people will get used to the navigation.

Suggestions?

Fixed in Mastodon v4.2.5 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.2.5

>You can defeat the Affero clause by putting the software behind a proxy, for example

Could someone elaborate on this? This is NOT my understanding of the license, and it seems absurd considering e.g. Mastodon is AGPL but the standard install requires a reverse proxy[1]. If using a proxy defeats Affero, why would the Mastodon team do this? Are they stupid?

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/dist/nginx.co...

Mastodon is free and open-source. Go ahead and add the flag:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING....