Sam Soffes

Sleep Schedule

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I'm really bad at sleep. There are so many more things I'd rather be doing. There was the one Bond villain that only had to sleep for 15 minutes a day or something. I want that.

I generally go to bed around 2am or 3am. Since I work from home, I wake up around 8:30 and starting in bed right away. I spend an enormous amount of time working in bed instead of at my desk. On most days, I don't get out of bed until 11 or 12. It's pretty great.

After my Seesaw work is doing around 6:30ish, I hang out with family and such. Around 10 or 11 I'll start working on whatever side project I feel like that evening. Lately, it's been Roon.

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Making Roon Faster

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Last night, I deployed some changes to Roon that made things a lot faster. Drew told me I should write about it, so here we are. I did three things:

Our assets were taking awhile to load because S3 is a tad slow. We use the fantastic asset_sync to serve assets off of S3 instead of Heroku. This is a big performance (and cost) win by itself since Heroku is expensive and is better suited serving dynamic requests.

The main problem here is webfonts. Users can't see any text on our pages until the font loads for the first time. This is kind of a big deal for a blogging app. Even worse, due to iOS security, if you hit Roon in Tweetbot (or any other app using UIWebView), it will have to download it since it doesn't share the system HTTP cache for security reasons. All of this made Roon feel super slow—especially on mobile.

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Tearing Up the Carpet

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Someone asked what Markdown parser we use for Roon. Roon uses Redcarpet.

I figured it was worth expanding a bit about this though. Mainly two things Roon does that's sorta unique made possible by the fabulous Redcarpet folks.

We have underline support. As far as I know, we are the only people that support this right now. Here's how you write it:

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