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Technical

Electron and other frameworks

Last week Discord announced they were dropping Electron (the Chromium-based framework) in favour of a native Rust rewrite. They claim it drops memory usage to 290 MB.

This would be impressive if it pans out. On my machine, at the moment, I see 842.4 MB being used by Discord.

What's your opinion of Electron? It's been the foundation of many apps I use daily (Slack, VS Code, Discord). Is it worth the price paid in memory (which isn't cheap!)? Is Discord going to lead a trend? If starting a new project, what framework would you use?

Everyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Proton Meet link will be posted at 12 pm Alberta Time aka Central Standard Time (ABT/CST/UTC-6).

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It's Five/Four/Six O'Clock Somewhere in Western Canada?

The initial topic for today's (Nov 3, 2026) chat: What time is it? A simple question that was complicated in Alberta and other western Canadian provinces this week as they stopped observing daylight saving time last weekend (Nov 1st).

I've spent the last couple days double checking the time on my operating systems and various calendars. Not all providers have added the new Alberta Time (ABT) time zone yet, or if they did I needed to manually set it, move existing events, etc. I also have an older Synology NAS that I don't think will ever get the new time zone.

Let's chat about time, time zones, and how you deal with it in software and databases. We can also chat about how you would "fix time" if you were supreme ruler of Earth.

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

P.S. - The image was created by ChatGPT. For some reason Alberta is to the right and both Saskatchewan and B.C. are to the left.

Cartoon of a clock above a sign reading "It's Five/Four/Six O'Clock Somewhere in Western Canada?", with signposts for Alberta (ABT), Saskatchewan (SST), and British Columbia (PST) and a Nov 1 calendar marking the end of daylight saving time

Code Is Cheap. Show Me the ___.

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." Linus Torvalds' line assumed writing code was the hard part. With AI tools producing code faster than we can read it, maybe that's no longer true. So if code is cheap now, what's the scarce thing? Judgment? Taste? Tests? The spec? The review? Fill in the blank.

Do you actually review every line the AI writes for you? Be honest. Where do you draw the line between a throwaway prototype and production code? How do you manage your usage: budgets, limits, tasks you'll never hand off? And do you still get the kick from solving a problem yourself, or has the fun moved from writing code to directing it?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

A dancer performing with live-coded music projected onto their arms