In 2021 I wrote an article encouraging people not to build general purpose APIs for their own front-ends. (You should probably read it before reading this one.) It got featured on Hacker News twice, albeit with a worse reception (and more heated discussion) the second time a...
There’s no denying that AI is getting very capable, but one thing keeps bothering me: what happens if something goes wrong?
Right now, self-driving cars still require human monitoring and intervention (outside of specially-designated areas). Isn’t this also true of a suffici...
Some API vendors give you an API doc in a giant custom-edited PDF file. In my case it’s >1200 pages, with a “helpful” table of contents that itself spans about 20 pages.
Well, I dislike reading giant PDF docs, love writing Ruby, and there’s an awesome RubyLLM gem, and Gem...
Big (or “Long Term”) refactors are hard to pull off in a busy company. To succeed, we must:
Convince business that it’s worth the delay.
Decide what features will have to wait.
Produce regular status updates and ETAs.
Justify the refactor as we go. Is it the right approach?...
In Ruby you can kinda pretend that you have type enforcement at runtime, because Ruby is very flexible. This could be a useful-enough thing to do to organize and formalize the “guarding” of your data. As a disclaimer, I’m not actually a huge fan of this practice, because I t...
I’ve explored DHH’s way of writing Rails applications. His introduction of CurrentAttributes and suppressors of callbacks a few years ago made me want to revisit his Youtube Screencasts on Basecamp 3 and try to really appreciate this approach with an open mind.
I soon unders...
The term “premature optimization” is often misused. It’s supposed to be about trading simplicity for unnecessary performance gains. Instead, it’s used as a blanket dismissal of anything unfamiliar. That’s both inaccurate, and hostile to good engineering. Throughout my career...
Every ruby enumerator supports count. It’s a method that will iterate over every item and return their total count.
irb> enum = Enumerator.new { |yielder|
(1..100).each do |i|
puts "counting item: #{i}"
yielder << i
end
}
irb> enum.count
counting ite...
Writing maintainable code is easy. Just keep methods and argument lists short, names and comments long, and follow a styleguide. Boom! Done. Unfortunately, as one famous journalist once wrote:
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
...
Code Reviews are First-Class Citizens
Code reviews are an integral part of our daily work as engineers. They help us reduce bugs, share knowledge, collaborate asynchronously, build rapport, feel recognized, and most importantly, keep software maintainable. Diligent code revi...
Update 2025-12-11: There is now a follow up article (4 years later).
TL;DR YAGNI, unless you’re working in a big company with federated front-ends or GraphQL.
It’s popular in web dev nowadays to build a backend that serves JSON, and a frontend that renders the app. This is f...
The other day I was listening to this Bikeshed podcast episode, where the hosts were discussing when is it a good idea to memoize values using ||= ruby idiom. Since this is a common question even among seasoned developers, I decided to write up my take on it. The short answe...
Using docker in development can be very convenient, but running your actual app (you know, the one you’re coding) in docker introduces various headaches.
Mounted volumes are slow and error-prone
You need hacks and shortcuts to run any console/debug commands in containers
Li...
Non Rails-specific
Gem elasticsearch-transport
Provides a bare-bones HTTP client that doesn’t have any Elasticsearch-specific api methods, but knows how to discover and connect to multiple servers, rotate connections, and log things.
readme: elastic/elasticsearch-ruby/elast...
I started porting my setup from Chef to Ansible a few weeks ago. Having had plenty of experience with Chef gave me a pretty good idea of what I wanted to achieve. One of the main advantages I see in Ansible is the ability to drive your server setup via ssh from your own mach...
chmod [a]bcd
bit
scope
description
a
sticky:1, setgid:2, setuid:4 (optional, default: 0)
b
owner
x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7
c
group
x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7
d
everyone
x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7
Note: only file/dir owner can chmod ...
Many years ago there was a Rails app. It started with things. These things were actually blueprints for other things. The other things needed many associated parts, and parts of parts. How many? The blueprints knew. The blueprints absolutely had to have an admin interface, b...
If you add a dir directly under app/
Do nothing. All files in this dir are eager loaded in production and lazy loaded in development by default.
If you add a dir under app/something/
(e.g. app/models/concerns/, app/models/products/)
Ask: do I want to namespace modules a...
Imagine writing an online shop with different types of products. Normally all products would have common attributes such as title and price. Some attributes will likely differ. Tee may have size such as S, M, or L, while a Pen could have an ink_color. It’s easy to see that T...
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