The “catastrophe scenario” of AI in the software engineering job market has gained quite a lot of popularity, with people pointing out that current models already “do a better job” (what does that even mean?) than many professional programmers. I’m not sure I completely buy into this.

So dreary I didn't need to compact this image.

After about two years living in metro Vancouver, I decided to leave. I’m in a smaller city in the Fraser Valley, and it has been great!

My first time in Vancouver was for an interview at Amazon in 2019. I stayed at a hotel near the downtown office for a couple of nights, which was less time than I spent in the 6 different airplanes and a similar number of airports to get there from Brazil. Then the pandemic happened. After almost two years waiting for the visa, I finally moved to Vancouver in late 2021.

Since Rails 5, Rails has had an encrypted credentials.enc file which you can use to store secrets like API tokens and passwords.

I’ve come to see the shortcomings of this approach, and now I’m back to the traditional way of storing secrets on environment variables.

Although it might be a simpler solution when starting out a new project, the long-term problems of credentials.enc are significant. For example: with Rails’ credentials, updating secrets is typically tied to redeploying of the app, which is much slower than simply restarting a VM (what you would do if you were using ENVs).

But the biggest drawback of using Rails’ credentials is that it inevitably leads to having more than one source of truth for your project’s secrets: eventually your project will have extra-Rails dependencies, and they obviously won’t read from Rails’ credentials. So you’ll end up with some API keys defined in credentials.enc, and some others defined elsewhere, like a .env. Better, then, to use .env from the start, and use something like Infisical for management and team access.

I’ve been working on a side project with a friend for well over a year now, and in addition to the joy of working with someone you like on a problem of your choice, I’ve had quite a lot of “aha” (or “oh…”) moments.

We’re both basically happy with the state of our little project, with just a few small tweaks remaining before we can send it off into the world, except for one not-so-small thing: billing.