Dev Notes on Leon Mika

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:17:28 +1000

Small TIL about Zed: if you have something selected, and you hold down the Option key, you can spawn a new cursor and selection region. Useful for renaming things that are not identifiers: select one, then Option+Double Click to select other instances, then simply type in the new name.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:52:47 +1000

The recent version of Zed changed the caret movements of ⌥← and ⌥→ from one based on word boundaries to one based on sub-word boundaries, like when a case change occurs. If your caret was on the left of an identifier like MyFancyIdentifier, when you pressed ⌥→, instead of going to the end of the word, it’s moved to the front of “Fancy” since it detected a case change.

It’s a style of navigation I don’t care for. Fortunately, you can turn it off by opening keymap.json and adding the following:

// keymap.json
[
  {
    "unbind": {
      // -- Snip --
      "alt-left": "editor::MoveToPreviousSubwordStart",
      "alt-right": "editor::MoveToNextSubwordEnd",
      "shift-alt-left": "editor::SelectToPreviousSubwordStart",
      "shift-alt-right": "editor::SelectToNextSubwordEnd",
      // -- Snip --
    }
  }
]

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:41:55 +1000

Deployed a PostgreSQL database migration with some new nullable columns:

ALTER TABLE example ADD COLUMN thing TEXT;

The table has 100,000,000s of rows, so I was expecting the migration to take a few minutes. Instead, it was so fast I thought it wasn’t applied at all. PostgreSQL frickin’ rocks!

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:00:07 +1000

For anyone else using Hugo that would like to use files in the static directory as resources, to do things like produce images thumbnails, you can “mount” the static directory within the resource directory using Hugo modules. This blog post documents how. Did it myself and it worked a treat.

Working Around One-Shot GPUParticles2D Emitter Slowdown

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:15:44 +1000

I’ve got a couple of one-shot GPUParticles2D emitters in my Godot game, and they have a habit of causing slowdown when they’re emitted for the first time. For a while I tolerated this, but it’s got to the point where gameplay was being affected, and this had to be dealt with.

I had some success removing that slowdown using a variant of the technique documented here. Basically, you fire the emitter within the _ready() function, wait a single frame, then hide the emitter:

func _ready():
    pop_emitter.emitting = true
    await get_tree().process_frame
    pop_emitter.visible = false

This does mean you’ll need to set the emitter visibility to true when you want to fire it for real:

func emit_for_real():
    pop_emitter.visible = true
    pop_emitter.emitting = true

Based on my experience, the order is pretty important. The emitter needs to be visible while it’s emitting in order for the material to load. But it seems like a single frame is enough for that to happen. The technique also works if the emitter is a fair distance from the camera. And in that case, you probably don’t need to hide the emitter at all.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:01:41 +1000

Had to do some changes to NATS streams and consumers today, and learnt a few things from doing so.

First, it is possible to change the subject filters of a NATS consumer while it’s being used. That is, a client could be using it to pull messages, and it doesn’t need to reconnect or anything to get the effect of the consumer change. It will continue to receive messages, so long as they match the new subject filter.

Second, if you’re using the NATS CLI to change the filter, in order to specify multiple subject filters, include multiple --filter switches:

$ dc-nats consumer edit \
        --filter='topic.one' \
        --filter='topic.two' \
        --filter='topic.reset.>' my-stream my-consumer

Specifying a single --filter value with subjects separated by commas will not work. I’m not entirely sure what will happen but I suspect that it will create a subject filter that includes the commas in some way.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:17:36 +1000

I’m not sure if I’m the only one that experiences this but SSH on MacOS seems to have awful keep-alive out of the box. Connections constantly hang when I look away for more than a few minutes. So I can recommend this change in your SSH config:

# /etc/ssh/ssh_config
Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 30

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:26:11 +1000

The Stripe CLI doesn’t have a command for listing account tax IDs, but it’s still possible to list them using the get subcommand. For anyone else that needs it, here’s how you can list them:

stripe get /v1/tax_ids

And to get a single tax ID:

stripe get /v1/tax_ids/txi_abc123

Thu, 14 May 2026 15:10:02 +1000

TIAL that sleep is actually not available on the Distroless Docker images, at least from what I can see from Stack Overflow. So if you’re going to use Pod Lifecycle events to wait for requests to finish up, you’ll need some other means of sleeping.