Loop

I’ve been doing more technical leadership work recently and apart from spreadsheets that means more documents. Loop is Microsoft’s version of Notion, focusing on wiki-like pages with block content and the ever-present slash command to insert specialised blocks.

As a noting experience it is much more pleasant than OneNote which seems to have gone to a very weird place since last I used it with an odd block UI rather than the Evernote style of noting. Loop is pretty much type inline and use slash to embed or nest another page.

Sharing is a bit more complex than Notion style products as you seem to only be able to share the entire Loop Workspace or nothing. It is hard to understand the organisational visibility of content.

Mermaid and Todo lists all embed as you’d expect and action lists integrate with Microsoft 365 todo lists and notifications system. You can also embed Loop components into Teams and other applications and it mostly seems to not just work but also be dynamically bi-directional so you can edit a component in the embed present in a chat rather than having to move to an edit mode.

Compared to most of the Office 365 suite it feels bracingly online and dynamic.

I’ve never been much of a macro or scripting person in these products so I don’t know if you can do some of the page and list magic that you can with Notion but all the core content features seem present and correct.

This seems like a great additional to the O365 suite and replaces the need for a bunch of adhoc hackery like the endless Word doc.

Ruby drama

Ruby (and Rails) has a problem in that it has never developed proper community governance. I realise now what a major step it was for Guido van Rossum to step away from the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) role and force the community to step.

This month Ruby Central took over the responsibility for managing key elements of the Ruby ecosystem (Gem, Bundler) and alienated most of the external open source community contributors. This just doesn’t happen in well run communities.

At the heart of the problem is really the Rails BDFL DHH. Now the core selling point of Rails as a framework is that it is opinionated and maintained by contributors whose livings depend on it. By frameworks that have more community governance like Django are seen as being slow moving and unresponsive. However at moments like these when a major leader in a project is going off the rails (pun intended) it is often a virtual to move slowly and make considered moves

Rails is still one of the smartest web frameworks for quick responsible development and its contrarian technology choices have been an excellent counterbalance to the groupthink that has prevailed in say the Node community where ultimately have burned themselves out on the endless upgrade trail of re-architecture after failed re-architecture.

The cost has been an over-dependence on a few key individuals with too much power and a few companies using their money and influence to run things to their benefit.

It will be interesting to see how this develops coming on the heels of WordPress debacle (and I’m conscious of the irony of me still posting here after all that has happened in that space). I suspect that the answer may be just a lot of quiet quitting to other projects and communities.

The more promising signs are an open letter asking for a Rails fork and better governance and the emergence of the Gem Cooperative. Maybe this will be the trigger to get to something much better than it replaces.

Reading list

• This article about creating a sidebar with modern webstandards contains an interesting technique to test HTML including the structure of design systems to visually see if they are being misused
• Migrating from Netlify to self-hosting

Fun tools

• Online shareable Python snippets
• Copy symbols to your clipboard, a joy of a simple website