One of the best podcasts interviews I have listened to in the past couple of months, if not during the past year. Guy Raz sits down together with Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify. You might not have heard of Shopify, but surely, if you have bought anything online during the past few years, which did not come form Amazon, you most certainly have used its flagship product.

Out of his passion for snowboarding, Tobias has managed to build a market leader in online sales software. Yet, I was amazed at how humble his whole attitude is. This is one trait I can directly trace to his German roots.

Fun fact: Tobias was one of the early adopters of Ruby on Rails, and as a result, Shopify is one of the largest sites using it nowadays, and a major flagship showcase, together with Basecamp.

Listen to the whole show:

I managed to find amazing podcast episode through Mixtape, the search and discovery engine for podcasts I built. Check it out and help me keep working on it, by buying me a coffee.

All of my Vue.js apps are being developed by proxying API calls to a remote server. This is why one of the first things I do with a new Vue.js app is to st up a vue.config.js file:

module.exports = {
  devServer: {
    proxy: {
      "/": {
        target: "https://remote-server.com",
        changeOrigin: true
      }
    }
  }
};

When calling yarn serve, I get the following message flashing in the developer console:

The connection to ws://remote-server.com was interrupted while the page was loading.

The app seems running and proxying to the remote API works just fine, but this annoying message obliterates everything else in the developer console. Thankfully, there is an easy way to get rid of it. Simply, add a ws: false to the configuration:

module.exports = {
  devServer: {
    proxy: {
      "/": {
        target: "https://remote-server.com",
        changeOrigin: true,
        ws: false
      }
    }
  }
};

My first attempt to try out compiling a Micronaut app to a native GraalVM image ended up with a disastrous “Out of Memory”. After more than ten minutes of a spinning fan (on a 4-core machine with 16GB RAM) that’s what I got:

I am fully aware that the hoops that the GraalVM compile has to go through are simply phenomenal, and I have heard many good words about the level of performance that apps are able to reach this way. Yet, as of this moment this option just seems too impractical, compared to Go’s compilation time of mere seconds.

That said, the startup time and memory footprint of the same Micronaut app running on the JVM are quite good, when compared to Spring Boot.

Apple is becoming a macOS gatekeeper too.

For the past 35 years, any Mac developer who wanted to ship an update directly to customers could do so by recompiling a binary and distributing it. When macOS 10.15 ships this fall, the status quo will change. Mac developers must register with Apple and sign their products. They must submit their binaries to Apple for notarization. And most significantly of all, they must agree to the terms of Apple’s App Store developer contracts, even if they don’t distribute their apps through the App Store.

via A Real Gatekeeper

My new favorite coffee mug - a special “You Are Here” Starbucks edition featuring Bulgaria. From what I heard, also quite a rare collectible item.

#TIL about the breakpoint() function in #Python 3.7 It starts a pdb session when the statement gets reached.

This is quite neat and might save me one or two print statements 😉

Thanks to @FlorimondManca for this discovery!

Scooter Craze

The scooter invasion reached Germany as well. 😲 If I recall correctly, electric scooter renting has been a hot topic across German courts, and has only been officially given a legal status at the beginning of July.

In what seems only a couple of days, hundreds of these have been dropped on the streets of Munich. Now both locals and tourists, thirsty for some thrill from their boring day, are desperately trying to end the lives of innocent pedestrians. I just hope they don’t follow the fate of OBike’s rentable bikes, some of which ended up in the local river. An electric scooter’s battery is a mini lab of toxic stuff, so if this is in your mind, please, think twice.