Sam Wilson's Website

April 2022

  5. Ditching ORM

    I’m working on a little side project at the moment (a PHP web app), and have decided to not use an ORM. It’s so great to be writing SQL again! Things are much faster to build and simpler to reason about. I know I could do everything I’m doing with the ORM, but I always get confused about how things are “supposed” to be done, and with straight SQL (or nearly straight: I’m using Doctrine’s DBAL which has lots of useful things like insert() etc.) I can just write what’s required. The query log is so much cleaner, and every query in it is meant to be there. Maybe I’m pushing too much filtering and ordering etc. to the database, but it does feel like that’s where it belongs. Why am I feeling defensive?! :-) Maybe I’m just another old-school PHP developer now, nostalgic for 2005.

  6. Avi Bryant @avibryant

    Early in my time managing the Data team at Stripe, @jeffbalogh built a tool called Hubble with massive impact. Here’s what it did:

    • there was a big textarea to type a SQL query into
    • it showed results in a table
    • it cached the results, and gave the query + results a permalink 75% of the value came from that. Sounds simple, but the simplicity was a huge part of it.

    Another 15% came from the ability to toggle simple chart views instead of the table.

    Most of the remaining 10% was that you could search through a log of everyone else’s queries. I’m mentioning this because most orgs could build this in a couple of days, but not many seem to have, and I think they should.

    (Something that in theory does this and more, but is encumbered with a lot more complexity and clicks, doesn’t count).

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514342058596524033.html

  7. Get a random post from the indieweb

    There’s an interesting indieweb discovery tool called indieblog.page, from Andreas Gohr (of Dokuwiki fame):

    I spent the weekend scratching another personal itch and released it as a mini project at indieblog.page.

    A recent post on hackernews asked users to share their personal sites with the world and the response was huge. Despite what people say, personal homepages and blogs are not dead.

    In fact there seems to be a certain fatigue with the big social media sites and kind of a renaissance of small scale, self hosted websites.

    With the indieblog.page website I want to collect those sites and make them discoverable using good old randomness.

    https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2022-04/10-weekend_project