Nate Hopkins hopsoft

JavaScript Microtasks: A Developer's Guide

What Are Microtasks and Why Should You Care?

As a JavaScript developer, you're likely familiar with the event loop handling asynchronous operations. However, microtasks provide a crucial middle layer between synchronous code execution and the macrotask queue that can significantly impact your application's behavior.

Think of microtasks as high-priority tasks that JavaScript executes immediately after the current synchronous operation, but before the next macrotask (like setTimeout callbacks) or render updates.

Common Sources of Microtasks:

TurboBoost

Note

The new TurboBoost monorepo, including the State feature is still WIP. Most of the functionality has been developed and tested. Unfortunately, the effort is currently on pause as I'm tackling other priorities right now.

State

TurboBoost manages various forms of state to provide a terrific reactive user experience.

Here’s a breakdown of each type:

Simple Template Rendering

I'm experimenting with a simple template rendering solution that leverages Ruby's native String formatting. It feels a little bit like Mustache templates. Note that this demo adds new "formatting specifiers" to support Rainbow color mechanics.

Tip

See the files below for the implementation... and note that this is simply a proof of concept (POC)

Usage

TurboBoost Commands Generator

The next version of TurboBoost will ship with generators to help you get started with Commands quickly.

View help for the generator

bin/rails g turbo_boost:command -h
Usage:
  bin/rails generate turbo_boost:command NAME [options]

TurboBoost Command Generator

Run the Generator

➜  showcase git:(main) bin/rails g turbo_boost:commands:command Example
Where is your Commands directory located? (default: app/commands)
   identical  app/commands/application_command.rb
      create  app/commands/example_command.rb

AI/Large Language Model Prompt Tuning Cheatsheet

When crafting prompts for AI or LLMs, you can adjust various inputs or variables to tailor the model's responses. Here's a simple guide to understanding what each of these terms means:

prompt: The question or statement you provide to the model, essentially telling it what you want to know or do.
- Example: "What is the weather today?" vs. "Write a poem about the rain."
- Effect: Directly sets the topic and style of the AI's response.
max_tokens: Limits how long the AI's response can be, like setting a maximum number of words or sentences it can use to answer.
50 - Makes the AI provide a concise, often one-sentence reply.

stdin → fzf with preview

Dependencies

ruby
ripgrep
fzf

Setup

Rails System Test Supervisor

System tests with Rails, Capybara, and Selenium (with the Chrome driver) may go rogue and spike the CPU to 100% on the spawned browser depending on how heavily you've monkey patched these libraries and/or have complex JavaScript that mutates the DOM (morphs etc.).

This supervisor class monitors the driver process and its children and will kill any rogue process that persistently spikes to >=99% CPU utilization for an extended period of time. If and when this occurs, you lose control of the browser and your tests will hang until they eventually time out or error.

ActiveRecord ETL

I created this to help me run benchmarks/comparisons against Universal ID, but it could serve as the foundation for a robust ETL data pipeline... and it's less than 70 LOC right now! 🤯 🚀

It handles the extract and transform parts of an ETL process and supports the following options:

only - specify which attributes to include

	# Builds an SQL insert query for a given record
	#
	# @param record [ActiveRecord::Base] Record used to build the SQL insert query
	# @return [String] SQL insert query
	def build_insert_query(record)
	columns = record.class.columns.reject { \|col\| col.name == record.class.primary_key }
	values = columns.map { \|col\| record[col.name] }
	insert_manager = Arel::InsertManager.new
	insert_manager.into(record.class.arel_table)
	insert_manager.insert(columns.zip(values)).to_sql