I've used vim as my primary text / code editing tool for...literally decades. A few years ago, I tried out neovim, hoping to take advantage of more advanced developer oriented features like treesitter and native LSP support.

At Shopify, I do a lot of work in Ruby. Our incredible developer experience team maintain ruby-lsp, a language server for the Ruby language.

Of course, I wanted to make sure that using it in neovim was a great experience!

LSPs can do many things: auto completion, enabling jumping to function or type definitions, showing function documentation, code formatting, and displaying code linting results.

In this particular instance, I wanted to take advantage of ruby-lsp's "diagnostics" support, which provides real-time feedback about syntax or linting errors (via rubocop)

For example:

brief aside: I find the nomenclature here is a bit awkward. LSP is an abbreviation for "Language Server Protocol". neovim implements a client which implements the LSP, which connects to one or more servers with also implement the protocol. Commonly a server which implements the LSP protocol is referred to as an "LSP server" or "LSP." I'll do that here.

Push vs pull

Unfortunately for me, neovim before 0.10 only supports "push" diagnostics, and ruby-lsp only supports "pull" diagnostics.

"Push" diagnostics are where the LSP pushes diagnostic information about your source code to the client (neovim in this case). The challenge with push diagnostics is that it's difficult for the LSP to know when to generate and send the diagnostics. It has no way to coordinate with other LSPs, and doesn't really how the user is interacting with the editor, aside from receiving events when the sourcecode has been changed. This becomes a problem when many changes to a file are made; how does the LSP know when to generate and push the diagnostics? Should it do it on every change? Wait for a bit after the last change is made?

These challenges are why the language server protocol was updated to add support for "pull" diagnostics. In this model the client (neovim) requests diagnostics from the LSP server, which is much more efficient since the client (neovim) can make much better decisions about when to perform sourcecode diagnostics.

more technically, "push" diagnostics are implemented via the textDocument/publishDiagnostics method. "pull" diagnostics are implemented via the textDocument/diagnostic method

Pull support in neovim (open-source FTW!)

Last year I spent some time adding support for pull diagnostics to neovim 0.10. I learned a lot about neovim, LSP, and lua in the process!

To me, this really highlights the benefits of open-source: there was something in my toolbox that I wasn't happy with, and I am empowered (and encouraged!) to contribute and make it better for everyone! Of course, I relied heavily on more experienced contributors to the project, and, of course, my initial implementation required some follow-ups.

My first neovim plugin

However, neovim 0.10 hasn't been released yet, and so I also wanted to make sure that I could use ruby-lsp with stable (0.9.x) versions of neovim.

So I created my very first neovim plugin: https://github.com/catlee/pull_diags.nvim. This enables "pull" diagnostics for neovim prior to 0.10. It's not quite as efficient as the support built into 0.10, but it works for my day to day development. If it doesn't work for you, please let me know!

Installing it is quite simple; for example, with Lazy.nvim:

{
  "catlee/pull_diags.nvim",
  event = "LspAttach",
  opts = {},
}

Final thoughts

As a professional software engineer, I think it's important to invest in the tools that I use to get my work done. Concretely, this means that I need (and want!) to spend time learning what new tools and techniques are out there now, and to make sure to sharpen my tools.

In this case, I wanted to take advantage of a new technology (LSP & ruby-lsp) in my editor of choice (neovim). Since these tools are all open-source, I'm empowered to change them to fit my needs.

In other words, as professionals, we shouldn't accept drawbacks or limitations in our tools: we should fix them! It's just another piece of software after all!

Shopify just laid off approximately 20% of its staff. A lot of fantastic people were let go.

(If you're hiring, let me know, I can put you in touch with some amazing engineers, managers, and designers!)

For those of us left behind, there's a bit of a sense of "what now?", "why wasn't I laid off too?", or "why did X get laid off instead of me (or Y)?""

One of Shopify's values is: "Thrive on Change". We famously cancelled a ton of meetings at the beginning this year.

I like to think of these events as shaking up my snow globe.

It's natural to develop a model of how our world works, and then to stop thinking about most things except the tasks at hand. We can't be re-evaluating everything from first principles all the time; models help us simplify so that we can be effective in day-to-day activities.

But sometimes our snow globe gets shaken up. Something happens that makes us re-examine some of out assumptions about our environment. Chaos Monkeys and layoffs are some events that shake up our snow globe.

If you've "survived" a layoff: you may be feeling guilty about still having a job. Survivor's guilt is real!

If you've been laid off: know that this says nothing about you as a person. You are still amazing, talented, and can make an incredible impact on the world.

I've been on both sides of this table throughout my career. There are almost never any simple answers to the "why?" questions.

All I know is that the best path forward isn't to wait first for the snow to settle. The snow never settles.

The best path forward is to enjoy a good snowfall.

We have an amazing development tool at Shopify called spin. Spin lets you create brand new cloud-based development environments in just a few seconds, right from your CLI. These environments are meant to be somewhat short-lived; I often spin one up just for the day to work on a PR, and then destroy it after my PR is merged.

As a longtime vim and linux user, I want to make sure that all my configuration files (aka "dotfiles") are made available automatically on any new environments that I'm setting up.

There are many different ways of managing your dotfiles. I started my journey with a "simple" shell script that tried to set up .vimrc, .zshrc, etc. Inevitably this script became overly complex, and was too cumbersome to maintain.

I briefly toyed around with ansible for managing my local system, but I found it to be overkill just managing dotfiles on remote systems.

Finally I discovered dotbot, which has a few features that I like:

• No dependencies
• Add into your dotfiles repo via a git submodule
• Supports most of the stuff I need, without being too complicated
• Configuration is easy to read & write
• Safe to re-run

In particular, to set up neovim, I have something like this in my dotbot configuration:

# install.conf.yaml
---
- defaults:
    link:
      relink: true
      force: true

- link:
    # This line symlinks the astronvim repo from the dotfiles checkout 
    # into ~/.config/nvim
    ~/.config/nvim: vim/astronvim
    # Link in our user configuration for astronvim
    ~/.config/nvim/lua/user/init.lua:
      path: vim/user_init.lua

- shell:
    # Install all neovim plugins with packer
    - nvim --headless -c 'autocmd User PackerComplete quitall' -c PackerSync

Since setting up my dotfiles with dotbot, I've discovered that I'm much more willing to experiment with different configurations and tools. It's easy to blow away local directories, or git restore in my dotfiles repo, and then re-run the install script.

One small tweak I made to the generic install script is to split up configurations by operating system and environment. I have different configurations for Linux, macOS, and spin. I also have the install script send logs to the home directory, which makes it easier to debug when something has gone wrong. Adding exec &> >(tee -a $HOME/.dotfile-install.log) at the top of the install script copies the script output to a log file in my home directory, as well as outputting to stdout/stderr.

My dotfiles can be found on github.

As I mentioned in my previous post, in my new role at Shopify, I've been doing backend development in Ruby. Previously I had been working nearly exclusively with Python for over ten years, so I was a bit nervous about the move.

In addition to my regular work, I also tried to solve other types of problems using Ruby. Advent of code was a really great way to learn a new language.

After nearly two years in the new role, I'd like to share some of my experiences, hopefully as a way to help and encourage others who would like to learn a new language, or are worried about moving into a new role, but don't know some specific technology.

Early pains

The first few weeks with Ruby were pretty tough. Luckily, Ruby shares some similarities with Python that make it a bit more approachable at first glance:

• Dynamically typed, interpreted language
• Class / method syntax is similar

Method calls don't need ()

One of the first things that tripped me up was not understanding that using () to call a method is not required in Ruby.

def greet
  puts "Hello, world!"
end

greet
# => "Hello, world!"

In fact, () are optional when passing arguments as well!

def greet(name)
  puts "Hello, #{name}"
end

greet "Chris"
# => "Hello, Chris"

This can be used to build some very nice DSL features, resulting in code that is much more readable. e.g. Rail's delegate method

require "rails" # to get delegate
class Message
  def greet
    puts "Hello!"
  end
end

class Greeter
  delegate :greet, to: :message
  attr_accessor :message
  def initialize
    @message = Message.new
  end
end

Greeter.new.greet
# => "Hello!"

Implicit return

Like Rust, the result of the last expression in Ruby is used as the return value of a function.

def add_one(x)
  x + 1
end

add_one(2)
# => 3

Strings & Symbols

Ruby has a concept called symbols, which are a kind of identifier using the : prefix. They're often used to reference method names, since you can't get a reference to a method just by accessing it by name like in Python. E.g. obj.foo will call the foo method on obj in Ruby, whereas it will give you a reference to the foo method in Python. The equivalent in Ruby would be obj.method(:foo)

Symbols are also used for named parameters in method calls. E.g.

def greet(message:)
  puts "Hello #{message}"
end

greet(message: "world!")
# => "Hello world!"

However, where symbols presented me with the steepest learning curve is how they're handled in Hash (i.e. dict) literals.

a = "key"
h = {
  a: 1,
  a => 2,
}
# => { :a=>1, "key"=>2 }

It's extremely easy to get the two ways of defining a value mixed up. I've wasted an embarrassing number of hours on bugs caused by mixing up strings and symbols as the keys in hashes.

Range expressions

Ruby has nice built-in syntax for ranges:

(0..5).to_a
# => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
(0...5).to_a
# => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

These are super convenient, but I almost always forget which form is inclusive and which is exclusive.

A-ha! moments

Blocks

Before really learning Ruby, I remember trying to read up on what blocks were...and not really getting it.

The best way I can come up with to explain them now is that they're a kind of anonymous function / closure.

Part of my confusion was not understanding that there are a few ways of defining and calling blocks.

These are equivalent:

mymap(0...5) do |x|
  x ** 2
end

# is the same as

mymap(0...5) { |x| x ** 2 }

The block's arguments are passed via the identifiers between the pipe (|) symbols.

In both cases, the mymap method is being passed a block, which in our case gets executed once per element (but that's completely up to the implementation of mymap). The block can be named as an explicit function parameter, and this could be written as:

def mymap(obj, &block)
  result = []
  for i in obj
    result.push(block.call(i))
  end
  result
end

The block can also be passed implicitly (check using the block_given? method) and called via yield:

def mymap(obj)
  result = []
  for i in obj
    result.push(yield i)
  end
  result
end

Once I wrapped my head around blocks, I found them to be very useful!

"&:" idiom

Ruby has this really neat shorthand for creating a block that calls a method on an object: "&:". It's used like this:

["hello", "world"].map(&:upcase)
# => ["HELLO", "WORLD"]

There are a few things going on here:

• :upcase is a Symbol referring to the upcase method on the object
• & tries to convert its argument to a kind of closure using the argument's .to_proc method. Symbol#to_proc returns a closure that calls the given method on the passed in object.

The net result is something equivalent to

["hello", "world"].map { |s| s.send(:upcase) }
# OR
["hello", "world"].map { |s| s.upcase }

Brian Storti explains this in much more detail in his blog post.

Enumeration

Ruby has fantastic enumeration primitives built in, just checkout the Enumerable module. Most of the basic container types in Ruby support Enumerable; when combined with blocks, this makes filtering and transforming data in Ruby a joy.

It also fits my brain better than Python's generator / comprehension expressions. When writing Python code to transform data, I often found that I was writing some code, then backing the cursor up to the beginning of the line.

In Ruby the data and logic flow from left to right, which makes it easy to chain thing together.

(0...5).map { |x| x ** 2 }

In Python the logic is on left but the data is on the right.

[x**2 for x in range(5)]

If I want to get only the square numbers that are even, I would simply add this in Ruby:

(0...5).map { |x| x ** 2 }.filter(&:even?)

Whereas in Python I would need to introduce more code before/after the expression I already have to achieve the same result:

[y for y in [x**2 for x in range(5)] if y % 2 == 0]

tl;dr

Ruby is a really nice language. I'm glad I've had the opportunity to learn it!

Python has a philosophy of "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.". I think this helps with Python's readability at the cost of expressibility, elegance, and conciseness in some cases.

In Ruby there are often multiple ways of achieving the same thing. It has a richer vocabulary for expressing ideas in code. This richness allows for more elegant code in many cases, although this perhaps requires more effort on the part of the reader to understand the code.

First off, hello, it's been a while!

Since my last post over three years ago 🤦, life has been pretty busy.

First, a global pandemic.

Next, we welcomed a new baby into the family the summer of 2020, right in the middle of said pandemic.

Then in the fall of 2020, I resigned from my job of nearly 12 years at Mozilla and I took on a new role as Staff Developer with Shopify. I've been doing backend product development work, focusing on making our themes more customizable by merchants, and extensible by third party apps.

I even got to publish a video describing a new feature I helped to build!

(Look, I'm on the internet!)

I've really enjoyed the move so far. It's been great to switch gears from infrastructure work in Python to product development in Ruby. I intend to blog a bit about my experience learning Ruby as a relatively experienced Python developer. tl;dr - I'm glad that I did. Learning new programming languages and tools is almost always beneficial, as it helps you to think about problems in different ways.