Sailing, Food, Programming, Technology, and other things
I am Will Jessop, CTO of Impactive and a Ruby on Rails and Postgres upgrade and performance consultant. I run Own&Ship, an app for tracking Ruby and Rails deprecations and helping manage upgrades.
I blog sporadically about my sailing adventures over at the Silver Girl website.
The charlock_holmes gem can be hard to install, here’s how I solved a common problem, updated for 2025
The final photos of my finished ping pong ball robot
A description of how to save memory and CPU time using the Ruby on Rails logger block syntax with examples of the memory saved
How I found and fixed the rows in our database that exceeded the BTree index size, preventing our migration to AlloyDB.
A followup to my post about using BUFFERS with EXPLAIN ANALYSE I talk about the IO timing tracking option in Postgres which can give you an exact breakdown of how long each part of a query took in milliseconds of IO time.
Many people are familiar with Postgres’ EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYSE reports, but there are a couple of useful options available when running them that aren’t always commonly known that can help you identify and fix potential problem areas. In this article I will go through how I used the BUFFERS report to help massively reduce the IO demands of a problem query, speeding up the query by nearly 1208 times.
I wanted to convert my old wordpress.com articles to Hugo and all off the “official” methods were cumbersome so I wrote a somewhat rough but fast and simple program to do the conversion for me.
In a recent update Firefox changed the order of it’s URL bar suggestions order to make search suggestions appear first before recently visited URLs. This is annoying so I changed it back.
The Dell OptiPlex 7010 SFF officially only has room for one 2.5" hard drive internally, I fitted two 3.25" hard drives and a 2.5" SSD in one.
Sometimes you have a test order issue CI that you want to debug locally, and to do that you need to only run the tests that knapsack runs in the relevant shard, in the right order. Here’s how to do that!