2026-05 - W2

What Is Code?

Using Vim’s Conceal Feature to Make Code More Readable (For You) - Alok’s blog

Interesting way to change rendering characters and words in vim. But I’m not sure if that’s the best, because, only “you” can read it, and also you might lose the habit of reading “classic” code.

Vous pensiez que la dette technique était le pire? Voici la dette de conception! - YouTube

Really interesting case study on an imaginary (but quite possible!) scenario illustrating design debt, started from spaghetti code, which can lead to organizational consequences, and have business and user impacts.

GitHub - dmtrKovalenko/fff: The fastest and the most accurate file search toolkit for AI agents, Neovim, Rust, C, and NodeJS · GitHub

Promising library that claims to be faster than ripgrep and fzf. To experiment 🤔

Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt. | Irrational Exuberance

Quite insightful.

Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This isn’t because they’re bad processes or poor tools, quite the opposite: the fact that something stops working at significantly increased scale is a sign that it was designed appropriately to the previous constraints rather than being over designed.

⌛ Et si on débuguait notre rapport au temps ? - YouTube

Quite insightful and actionable advice, to unload one’s brain.

Take 5 minutes per day to do nothing.

Greg Young — A Decade of DDD, CQRS, Event Sourcing - YouTube

Performance de backend Spring : les techniques que tout dev devrait connaître - YouTube

Some interesting techniques to improve spring web application.

# Log all slow queries that exceed 100ms
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.log_slow_query=100
# batch insert and update
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.batch_size=50
# re-order inserts multi-types for batching
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.order_inserts=true
# re-order updates multi-types for batching
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.order_updates=true
 
# max wait duration by the application/hibernate to connect to the database
# /!\ NOT the connection from the connection pool to the database!
spring.datasource.hikari.connection-timeout=10000

Configured JPA relations in LAZY mode, but load them in EAGER when needed.

I spent my whole career building passive income. Here’s what I got wrong. - Darius Foroux

I’m not saying don’t build passive income. I’m glad I did. Financial security is real and it matters. But it’s the wrong goal to organize your life around. Because the day you achieve it, you’ll realize it solved a practical problem but not the deeper one. The deeper goal is to keep challenging yourself every single day. It doesn’t have to be some grand pursuit of mastery. Just a small daily habit of doing the thing that’s slightly uncomfortable.

Yesterday I mowed the grass and trimmed the edges of the garden. I’m not a garden person. I don’t enjoy that kind of work. The grass had been long for a while and every time I looked at it, I didn’t like it. So I went out and mowed it. It took a couple of hours. It looked great when I was done. And I felt genuinely good afterward.

That’s the secret to living a happy life.

Write when you don’t feel like it. Work out when it’s easier to skip. Do your taxes instead of postponing again. Go outside when you’d rather stay in. Not because any of these things are important in themselves. But because the habit of doing hard things keeps you sharp. It keeps you relevant to yourself. It keeps the anxiety at bay better than any amount of passive income ever could.

The Emacsification of Software - Quarrelsome

What does it mean for software to be Emacsified? Let’s get into it. First, it’s personal software. Most of it will be useful only to its creator, and then forgotten, just like the dozens of obsolete little elisp programs littering my .emacs. Personal software defines the ethos of Emacs, which was carefully designed over decades to nurture these kinds of tools. “Emacsification” clocks that everything now works this way, not just baroque text editors. … If you’re a nerd comfortable with the idea of rolling your own software, everything is now programmable, not merely in a technical sense but a practical one. And that gets to a feeling I think a lot of people have when creating software with agents: what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.