Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
40
In this article, I tell the story of a memory leak we had in our HEY app, the cool tools I could use to investigate and how I finally figured out the root cause. Memory leaks can be tricky to diagnose and having the right set of tools makes a huge difference. I hope my adventures help you the next time you’re in a similar situation. The beginning Everything started with a report from our Operations team mentioning that HEY memory usage was often getting close to boiling over. We rarely deploy HEY during the weekends, and that’s when the issue manifested itself the most: The leak After a few days without deploying the app, the memory usage almost reached 100%, and then a deployment would reset it back to normal. This signals a slow and steady memory leak. Checking Ruby heap allocations The first approach I tried was logging and analyzing the Ruby Heap allocation stats. In particular, I looked for endpoints where: A minor (or major) GC run happened. heap_available_slots increased greatly. The theory is that when GC runs, it should clear most of the newly allocated objects, hence an increase of heap_available_slots paired with a GC run shouldn’t happen unless there is a leak. The analysis exposed 2 endpoints: MessagesController#update TopicsController#show These are the most heavily used endpoints of the app, so the result wasn’t conclusive at all. Heap dump I decided to proceed by extracting a Ruby heap dump. Luckily this can be done by running rbtrace in the app servers: bundle exec rbtrace -p $worker_pid -e 'Thread.new{GC.start; require "objspace"; File.open("/tmp/0.json","w"){|f| ObjectSpace.dump_all(output: f) }}' This command writes the $worker_pid heap dump to /tmp/0.json. Unfortunately, a heap dump extracted without enabling object trace allocation doesn’t contain key information such as: The GC generation it was allocated in The filename and line number it was allocated in A truncated value Object bytesize So even the basic heap dump...
7th Mar 2024

Stay updated

Get a weekly newsletter with the top 5 articles worth reading every week.

More from 37signals Dev

Lexxy: A new rich text editor for Rails

Today, we are introducing Lexxy, a new rich text editor for Action Text. It’s based on Lexical — Meta’s text editing framework — and it brings a much better text editing experience to Rails: Good HTML semantics. Paragraphs are real <p> tags, as they should be. Markdown support: shortcuts, auto-formatting on paste. Real-time code syntax highlighting. Create links by pasting URLs on selected text. Configurable prompts. Support for mentions and other interactive prompts with multiple loading and filtering strategies. Preview attachments like PDFs and Videos in the editor. Works seamlessly with Action Text and Active Storage. We created Lexxy because Trix was falling short of expectations in certain areas, and we encountered technical barriers when attempting to offer the experience we wanted. Lexxy comes with a bunch of juicy improvements, but more than that, we now have a fantastic foundation to build on top of. Lexxy will also bring a great improvement to Action Text: we will let you configure the editor in Action Text just like you configure the database in Active Record. This will open the door to integrating other editors in Rails. Text editing is central to our products. We believe Lexxy will let us deliver the editing experience we want. We are launching an early beta today, give it a try!

4th Sep 2025 • 1 votes
Introducing Action Push Native

Note: Shortly after releasing this gem, we renamed it from Action Native Push to Action Push Native, in case you arrived here looking for the gem of the former name. More details here. We’ve open-sourced Action Push Native, a Rails gem for sending push notifications to mobile platforms. It supports both Apple and Google push notification services. Why did we build it? We created it to migrate off Amazon SNS and Pinpoint, as part of our broader cloud exit. We’re using it in Basecamp and HEY to send more than 10 million push notifications per day without a hitch. Action Push Native relies on HTTP/2 persistent connections to the Apple Push Notification service, which significantly reduced job duration compared to our previous HTTP/1 setup with AWS Pinpoint: AWS Pinpoint jobs duration Action Push Native jobs duration How does it work? The gem connects directly to the Apple (APNs) and Google (FCM) push notification services. It handles retries, rate-limiting, and deleting dead devices automatically. Configure each platform with your credentials, and you can start sending notifications like this: device = ApplicationPushDevice.create! \ name: "iPhone 16", token: "6c267f26b173cd9595ae2f6702b1ab560371a60e7c8a9e27419bd0fa4a42e58f", platform: "apple" notification = ApplicationPushNotification.new \ title: "Hello world!", body: "Welcome to Action Push Native" notification.deliver_later_to(device) Version 0.1.0 is available now. You can read more on GitHub. We hope you find it useful!

18th Aug 2025 • 1 votes
Announcing Hotwire Native 1.2

We’ve just launched Hotwire Native v1.2 and it’s the biggest update since the initial launch last year. The update has several key improvements, bug fixes, and more API consistency between platforms. And we’ve created all new iOS and Android demo apps to show it off! A web-first framework for building native mobile apps Improvements There are a few significant changes in v1.2 that are worth specifically highlighting. Route decision handlers Hotwire Native apps route internal urls to screens in your app, and route external urls to the device’s browser. Historically, though, it wasn’t straightforward to customize the default behavior for unique app needs. In v1.2, we’ve introduced the RouteDecisionHandler concept to iOS (formerly only on Android). Route decisions handlers offer a flexible way to decide how to route urls in your app. Out-of-the-box, Hotwire Native registers these route decision handlers to control how urls are routed: AppNavigationRouteDecisionHandler: Routes all internal urls on your app’s domain through your app. SafariViewControllerRouteDecisionHandler: (iOS Only) Routes all external http/https urls to a SFSafariViewController in your app. BrowserTabRouteDecisionHandler: (Android Only) Routes all external http/https urls to a Custom Tab in your app. SystemNavigationRouteDecisionHandler: Routes all remaining external urls (such as sms: or mailto:) through device’s system navigation. If you’d like to customize this behavior you can register your own RouteDecisionHandler implementations in your app. See the documentation for details. Server-driven historical location urls If you’re using Ruby on Rails, the turbo-rails gem provides the following historical location routes. You can use these to manipulate the navigation stack in Hotwire Native apps. recede_or_redirect_to(url, **options) — Pops the visible screen off of the navigation stack. refresh_or_redirect_to(url, **options) — Refreshes the visible screen on the navigation stack. resume_or_redirect_to(url, **options) — Resumes the visible screen on the navigation stack with no further action. In v1.2 there is now built-in support to handle these “command” urls with no additional path configuration setup necessary. We’ve also made improvements so they handle dismissing modal screens automatically. See the documentation for details. Bottom tabs When starting with Hotwire Native, one of the most common questions developers ask is how to support native bottom tab navigation in their apps. We finally have an official answer! We’ve introduced a HotwireTabBarController for iOS and a HotwireBottomNavigationController for Android. And we’ve updated the demo apps for both platforms to show you exactly how to set them up. New demo apps To better show off all the features in Hotwire Native, we’ve created new demo apps for iOS and Android. And there’s a brand new Rails web app for the native apps to leverage. Hotwire Native demo app Clone the GitHub repos to build and run the demo apps to try them out: iOS repo Android repo Rails app Huge thanks to Joe Masilotti for all the demo app improvements. If you’re looking for more resources, Joe even wrote a Hotwire Native for Rails Developers book! Release notes v1.2 contains dozens of other improvements and bug fixes across both platforms. See the full release notes to learn about all the additional changes: iOS release notes Android release notes Take a look If you’ve been curious about using Hotwire Native for your mobile apps, now is a great time to take a look. We have documentation and guides available on native.hotwired.dev and we’ve created really great demo apps for iOS and Android to help you get started.

23rd Apr 2025 • 71 votes
Monitoring 10 Petabytes of data in Pure Storage

As the final part of our move out of the cloud, we are working on moving 10 petabytes of data out of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). After exploring different alternatives, we decided to go with Pure Storage FlashBlade solution. We store different kinds of information on S3, from the attachments customers upload to Basecamp to the Prometheus long-term metrics. On top of that, Pure’s system also provides filesystem-based capabilities, enabling other relevant usages, such as database backup storage. This makes the system a top priority for observability. Although the system has great reliability, out-of-the-box internal alerting, and autonomous ticket creation, it would also be good to have our metrics and alerts to facilitate problem-solving and ensure any disruptions are prioritized and handled. For more context on our current Prometheus setup, see how we use Prometheus at 37signals. Pure OpenMetrics exporter Pure maintains two OpenMetrics exporters, pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter and pure-fa-openmetrics-exporter. Since we use Pure Flashblade (fb), this post covers pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter, although overall usage should be similar. The setup is straightforward and requires only binary and basic authentication installation. Here is a snippet of our Chef recipe that installs it: pure_api_token = "token" # If you use Chef, your token should come from an ecrypted databag. Changed to hardcoded here to simplify PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION = "1.0.13".freeze # Generally, we use Chef node metadata for version management. Changed to hardcoded to simplify directory "/opt/pure_exporter/#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}" do recursive true owner 'pure_exporter' group 'pure_exporter' end # Avoid recreating under /tmp after reboot if target_binary is already there target_binary = "/opt/pure_exporter/#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter" remote_file "/tmp/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter-v#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}-linux-amd64.tar.gz" do source "https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter/releases/download/v#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter-v#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}-linux-amd64.tar.gz" not_if { ::File.exist?(target_binary) } end archive_file "/tmp/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter-v#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}-linux-amd64.tar.gz" do destination "/tmp/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter-v#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}" action :extract not_if { ::File.exist?(target_binary) } end execute "copy binary" do command "sudo cp /tmp/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter-v#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/pure-fb-openmetrics-exporter /opt/pure_exporter/#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/pure-exporter" creates "/opt/pure_exporter/#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/pure-exporter" not_if { ::File.exist?(target_binary) } end tokens = <<EOF main: address: purestorage-mgmt.mydomain.com api_token: #{pure_api_token['token']} EOF file "/opt/pure_exporter/tokens.yml" do content tokens owner 'pure_exporter' group 'pure_exporter' sensitive true end systemd_unit 'pure-exporter.service' do content <<-EOU # Caution: Chef managed content. This is a file resource from #{cookbook_name}::#{recipe_name} # [Unit] Description=Pure Exporter After=network.target [Service] Restart=on-failure PIDFile=/var/run/pure-exporter.pid User=pure_exporter Group=pure_exporter ExecStart=/opt/pure_exporter/#{PURE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/pure-exporter \ --tokens=/opt/pure_exporter/tokens.yml ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID SyslogIdentifier=pure-exporter [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target EOU action [ :create, :enable, :start ] notifies :reload, "service[pure-exporter]" end service 'pure-exporter' Prometheus Job Configuration The simplest way of ingesting the metrics is to configure a basic Job without any customization: - job_name: pure_exporter metrics_path: /metrics static_configs: - targets: ['<%= @hostname %>:9491'] labels: environment: 'production' job: pure_exporter params: endpoint: [main] # From the tokens configuration above For a production-ready setup, we are using a slightly different approach. The exporter supports the usage of specific metric paths to allow for split Prometheus jobs configuration that reduces the overhead of pulling the metrics all at once: - job_name: pure_exporter_array metrics_path: /metrics/array static_configs: - targets: ['<%= @hostname %>:9491'] labels: environment: 'production' job: pure_exporter metric_relabel_configs: - source_labels: [name] target_label: ch regex: "([^.]+).*" replacement: "$1" action: replace - source_labels: [name] target_label: fb regex: "[^.]+\\.([^.]+).*" replacement: "$1" action: replace - source_labels: [name] target_label: bay regex: "[^.]+\\.[^.]+\\.([^.]+)" replacement: "$1" action: replace params: endpoint: [main] # From the tokens configuration above - job_name: pure_exporter_clients metrics_path: /metrics/clients static_configs: - targets: ['<%= @hostname %>:9491'] labels: environment: 'production' job: pure_exporter params: endpoint: [main] # From the tokens configuration above - job_name: pure_exporter_usage metrics_path: /metrics/usage static_configs: - targets: ['<%= @hostname %>:9491'] labels: environment: 'production' job: pure_exporter params: endpoint: [main] - job_name: pure_exporter_policies metrics_path: /metrics/policies static_configs: - targets: ['<%= @hostname %>:9491'] labels: environment: 'production' job: pure_exporter params: endpoint: [main] # From the tokens configuration above We also configure some metric_relabel_configs to extract labels from name using regex. Those labels help reduce the complexity of queries that aggregate metrics by different components. Detailed documentation on the available metrics can be found here. Alerts Auto Generated Alerts As I shared earlier, the system has an internal Alerting module that automatically triggers alerts for critical situations and creates tickets. To cover those alerts on the Prometheus side, we added an alerting configuration of our own that relies on the incoming severities: - alert: PureAlert annotations: summary: '{{ $labels.summary }}' description: '{{ $labels.component_type }} - {{ $labels.component_name }} - {{ $labels.action }} - {{ $labels.kburl }}' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: purefb_alerts_open{environment="production"} == 1 for: 1m We still need to evaluate how the pure-generated alerts will interact with the custom alerts I will cover below, and we might decide to stick to one or the other depending on what we find out. Hardware Before I continue, the image below helps visualize how some of the Pure FlashBlade components are physically organized: Because of Pure’s reliability, most isolated hardware failures do not require the immediate attention of an Ops team member. To cover the most basic hardware failures, we configure an alert that sends a message to the Ops Basecamp 4 project chat: - alert: PureHardwareFailed annotations: summary: Hardware {{ $labels.name }} in chassis {{ $labels.ch }} is failed description: 'The Pure Storage hardware {{ $labels.name }} in chassis {{ $labels.ch }} is failed' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: purefb_hardware_health == 0 for: 1m labels: severity: chat-notification We also configure alerts that check for multiple hardware failures of the same type. This doesn’t mean two simultaneous failures will result in a critical state, but it is a fair guardrail for unexpected scenarios. We also expect those situations to be rare, keeping the risk of causing unnecessary noise low. - alert: PureMultipleHardwareFailed annotations: summary: Pure chassis {{ $labels.ch }} has {{ $value }} failed {{ $labels.type }} description: 'The Pure Storage chassis {{ $labels.ch }} has {{ $value }} failed {{ $labels.type }}, close to the healthy limit of two simultaneous failures. Ensure that the hardware failures are being worked on' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: count(purefb_hardware_health{type!~"eth|mgmt_port|bay"} == 0) by (ch,type,environment) > 1 for: 1m labels: severity: page # We are looking for multiple failed bays in the same blade - alert: PureMultipleBaysFailed annotations: summary: Pure chassis {{ $labels.ch }} has fb {{ $labels.fb }} with {{ $value }} failed bays description: 'The Pure Storage chassis {{ $labels.ch }} has fb {{ $labels.fb }} with {{ $value }} failed bays, close to the healthy limit of two simultaneous failures. Ensure that the hardware failures are being worked on' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: count(purefb_hardware_health{type="bay"} == 0) by (ch,type,fb,environment) > 1 for: 1m labels: severity: page Finally, we configure high-level alerts for chassis and XFM failures: - alert: PureChassisFailed annotations: summary: Chassis {{ $labels.name }} is failed description: 'The Pure Storage hardware chassis {{ $labels.name }} is failed' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: purefb_hardware_health{type="ch"} == 0 for: 1m labels: severity: page - alert: PureXFMFailed annotations: summary: Xternal Fabric Module {{ $labels.name }} is failed description: 'The Pure Storage hardware Xternal fabric module {{ $labels.name }} is failed' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: purefb_hardware_health{type="xfm"} == 0 for: 1m labels: severity: page Latency Using the metric purefb_array_performance_latency_usec we can set a threshold for all the different protocols and dimensions (read, write, etc), so we are alerted if any problem causes the latency to go above an expected level. - alert: PureLatencyHigh annotations: summary: Pure {{ $labels.dimension }} - {{ $labels.protocol }} latency high description: 'Pure {{ $labels.protocol }} latency for dimension {{ $labels.dimension }} is above 100ms' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: (avg_over_time(purefb_array_performance_latency_usec{protocol="all"}[30m]) * 0.001) for: 1m labels: severity: chat-notification Saturation For saturation, we are primarily worried about something unexpected causing excessive use of array space, increasing the risk of hitting the cluster capacity. With that in mind, it’s good to have a simple alert in place, even if we don’t expect it to fire anytime soon: - alert: PureArraySpace annotations: summary: Pure Cluster {{ $labels.instance }} available space is expected to be below 10% description: 'The array space for pure cluster {{ $labels.instance }} is expected to be below 10% in a month, please investigate and ensure there is no risk of running out of capacity' dashboard: 'https://grafana/your-dashboard' expr: (predict_linear(purefb_array_space_bytes{space="empty",type="array"}[30d], 730 * 3600)) < (purefb_array_space_bytes{space="capacity",type="array"} * 0.10) for: 1m labels: severity: chat-notification HTTP We use BigIp load balancers to front-end the cluster, which means that all the alerts we already had in place for the BigIp HTTP profiles, virtual servers, and pools also cover access to Pure. The solution for each organization on this topic will be different, but it is a good practice to keep an eye on HTTP status codes and throughput. Grafana Dashboards The project’s GitHub repository includes JSON files for Grafana dashboards that are based on the metrics generated by the exporter. With simple adjustments to fit each setup, it’s possible to import them quickly. Wrapping up On top of the system’s built-in capabilities, Pure also provides options to integrate their system into well-known tools like Prometheus and Grafana, facilitating the process of managing the cluster the same way we manage everything else. I hope this post helps any other team interested in working with them better understand the effort involved. Thanks for reading!

2nd Jan 2025 • 92 votes
Mission Control — Jobs 1.0 released

We’ve just released Mission Control — Jobs v1.0.0, the dashboard and set of extensions to operate background jobs that we introduced earlier this year. This new version is the result of 92 pull requests, 67 issues and the help of 35 different contributors. It includes many bugfixes and improvements, such as: Support for Solid Queue’s recurring tasks, including running them on-demand. Support for API-only apps. Allowing immediate dispatching of scheduled and blocked jobs. Backtrace cleaning for failed jobs’ backtraces. A safer default for authentication, with Basic HTTP authentication enabled and initially closed unless configured or explicitly disabled. Recurring tasks in Mission Control — Jobs, with a subset of the tasks we run in production We use Mission Control — Jobs daily to manage jobs HEY and Basecamp 4, with both Solid Queue and Resque, and it’s the dashboard we recommend if you’re using Solid Queue for your jobs. Our plan is to upstream some of the extensions we’ve made to Active Job and continue improving it until it’s ready to be included by default in Rails together with Solid Queue. If you want to help us with that, are interested in learning more or have any issues or questions, head over to the repo in GitHub. We hope you like it!

4th Dec 2024 • 65 votes

More in programming

Abusing ID3 chapters to turn videos into glanceable podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I like how they fit around other tasks. I press play, lock my phone, and put it down. I’m free to wash the dishes, fold the laundry, or shop for groceries. Unfortunately, more and more information is only published as a video. Technical talks, conference sessions, video essays – they don’t work in an audio-only podcast app. I could convert these videos to MP3 files, but that breaks down the moment a video isn’t pure spoken word. If a speaker says, “Look at this slide” or holds up a diagram, an audio-only file leaves me stranded. I don’t want to give up the podcast player I like, nor stare at a screen for an hour – but I do want the information in these videos. To solve this, I’m abusing my podcast player’s chapter support. This gives me the best of both worlds: I can listen to a video as audio-first, and glance at my lock screen if I need a moment of visual context. The idea: Chapters every few seconds MP3 files can have ID3 metadata, and ID3 metadata can include chapters. A chapter covers a particular time range, and it can have an associated title, description, and cover art. My podcast app of choice is Overcast, which can’t play videos, but it does have robust chapter support. I can jump between chapters, navigate a table of contents, and see per-chapter cover art. To get videos into Overcast, I’m creating MP3 files with a new chapter every few seconds, and the per-chapter cover art is a corresponding frame from the video. As I play the file, I get a slow, stop-motion-like rendition of the original video. If my phone is locked, I can glance at my lock screen and see the current frame in the Now Playing screen. Overcast is developed by Marco Arment, and I got this idea from Forecast, his app for adding chapters to podcasts. In particular, I was struck by its ability to create chapters that don’t display in the chapter list – ideal if I don’t want a table of contents with hundreds of entries. As I was developing my script, I compared my output to the output from Forecast to ensure I was creating the chapters correctly. The code: FFmpeg and Mutagen There are three steps in this process: Convert a video file to an MP3 Extract images from the video at a fixed interval Insert the images as hidden chapters in the MP3 file Let’s go through each in turn. 1. Convert a video file to an MP3 Converting a video file to an MP3 is a single FFmpeg command: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 audio.mp3 This is consistently the slowest step of the process, and I do wonder if I could use different settings or an alternative encoder to make it go faster – but it’s not slow enough to be worth further investigation. 2. Extract images from the video at a fixed interval Extracting images from a video needs a more complicated FFmpeg command: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 \ -vf 'fps=1/5,scale=iw*sar:ih,scale=min(iw\,945):min(ih\,945):force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease' \ thumbnail_%04d.jpg This extracts an image every 5 seconds, downscales any image larger than 945 pixels square (while preserving the original aspect ratio), and saves the results as sequentially numbered JPEG images (thumbnail_0001.png, thumbnail_0002.png, and so on). The key is the -vf flag, which defines two FFmpeg filters: The fps filter selects one frame every 5 seconds (fps=1/5). The first scale filter scales the width based on the sample aspect ratio (scale=iw*sar:ih). Without this filter, frames can be stretched and distorted. The second scale filter scales the input video, preserving the original aspect ratio (force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease), and ensuring the output images fit within 945×945px or the size of the input video, whichever is smaller. My limit is 945 pixels because that’s the largest size that cover art is shown on my iPhone. This filter still isn’t completely correct – it sometimes creates images from portrait videos that are smaller than I’m expecting – but it’s good enough. These are only thumbnails for glancing at, and if I want to change it later, I can always do the image resizing outside FFmpeg. 3. Insert the images as hidden chapters in the MP3 file Inserting the chapters into the MP3 file is more complicated. Although FFmpeg has basic support for ID3 metadata, as far as I know, it can’t insert chapters with per-chapter artwork. Instead, I’m going to reach for Python and the Mutagen library. Here’s the code to add a chapter to an MP3 file: from mutagen.id3 import APIC, CHAP, ID3, PictureType audio = ID3("audio.mp3") with open("thumbnail_0001.jpg", "rb") as f: img_data = f.read() image_frame = APIC(mime="image/jpeg", type=PictureType.OTHER, data=img_data) chapter_frame = CHAP( element_id="chp1", start_time=0, end_time=5 * 1000, sub_frames=[image_frame] ) audio.add(chapter_frame) audio.save() This creates a single chapter that lasts the first 5 seconds (0 to 5000 milliseconds), and the per-chapter cover art is thumbnail_0001.jpg. If we ran this in a loop, we could add images for every 5 second slice of the original video. This code is inserting two frames into the ID3 metadata: The CHAP (chapter) frame contains the timing information, and it can have subframes for metadata like title, chapter art, or associated URL. The APIC (attached picture) subframe contains information about a picture, which can either be a blob of image data or a URL to an image on the web. Normally, you’d also insert a CTOC frame which defines a table of contents, but I don’t want a TOC with hundreds of 5-second chapters, so I’m deliberately not doing this here. This is allowed by the ID3 spec – you’re not required to insert a CTOC frame if you’re using chapters, and you can have chapters that aren’t listed in your table of contents. To work out which frames I needed, I used Forecast to create some chapters by hand, and I inspected their frames. In particular, loading an MP3 and calling Mutagen’s pprint() method shows a human-readable list of frames, and then I could drill into the individual fields: from mutagen.id3 import ID3 audio = ID3("audio.mp3") print(audio.pprint()) I wrapped all this code in a project called glancecast, which allows you to convert a video file with a single command, with optional flags to set the frame length and chapter art size: $ python3 glancecast.py interesting_talk.mp4 interesting_talk.mp3 The process takes a minute or so to complete, most of which is spent transcoding the video file to MP3. The resulting MP3s are usually 40 to 50 MB in size, which is very reasonable. The outcome: How it looks in practice Here’s what one of these “glanceable” podcasts looks like in Overcast and on my lock screen: Maggie Appleton presented this talk over two years ago and it’s been on my “talks to watch” list ever since. Once I put it in Overcast? I listened to it in less than a day. It’s not a lot of extra information, but enough that I can quickly glance down and get the gist of what a speaker is saying. Both views update with a new frame every few seconds, or I can put my phone in my pocket and ignore the screen. I’ve used this approach for half a dozen videos so far, and I’m happy with the results. I expect to keep using it, because I have a long queue of videos I’ve been meaning to watch. If you’d like to try this, check out glancecast for the full code and instructions. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]

17 hours ago • 1 votes
AI Isn’t Replacing Open Source

Andrew Baker, the current Group CIO at Capitec Bank wrote an interesting piece on AI and open source, and how these tools that generate code according to one’s specification may replace the general reliance on open source implementations done by contributors around the world. I’d really recommend reading it. I have great admiration and respectContinue reading "AI Isn’t Replacing Open Source"

yesterday • 1 votes
Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob

A framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation

2 days ago • 1 votes
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces

Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents

2 days ago • 1 votes
Foundations of Agent Friendly Codebases

A look at 10 foundational pillars that enable agents to operate more competently and more efficiently in any codebase.

3 days ago • 1 votes
📚 BoredReading

You seem to be enjoying this.

Join free to unlock everything.

Create free account

Already have an account? Sign in