🔖 Bookmarks

How to make 768 distinct Postgres servers look like 1 to your applications.

Learn how to add AI features to a Rails app with LLM APIs, pgvector RAG, and Sidekiq. 5 production patterns from a team that ships Rails+AI.

Who won?

A practical guide for starting and sustaining a local Ruby meetup.

I’m starting a new blog post series that I’ve named “ATProto in Practice”. I want to go through some practical tasks that you’re likely to need when working with the protocol, using Ruby and my Ruby gems for the examples. These will (hopefully) be a bit shorter than my standard book-length blog posts here 🫠

Inertia is Turbolinks with one twist: render JSON instead of HTML on the second visit. We rebuild the whole protocol on a real Rails app with a 50-line client and a 16-line server, then audit what the real gem adds on top.

Rails 8.1 lets you mark old associations as deprecated. Here’s what changed, why it matters, and how to clean up your code without breaking your app.

I’m at RubyConf this week, and it’s great! I recently read that lobste.rs is now running on SQLite. One part from the post caught my attention: I wish we could say in a test, “Fail if you encounter any full table scans”. Which would have caught the perf issues we experienced during the first deploy. SQLite collects information about prepared statements and exposes those statistics though an API. The upshot of this is that we can tell whether a statement did a full table scan after executing the statement without using an EXPLAIN.

A talk exploring i18n in Rails, and how it can be useful even when we're not translating our applications into other languages. I gave this talk at Brighton Ruby in 2026.

For decades, one of the most notoriously-challenging problems on the web has been sticking one element to another element, for things like tooltips and nested menus. The CSSWG has decided to provide a first-class solution to this problem, and it’s pretty friggin’ cool! In this tutorial, I’ll share the most useful parts I’ve found from this modern CSS feature.

A flexible helper for conditional rendering. Show content when allowed, hide it, redirect to a link or render a fallback. Extracted from my SaaS apps.

Learn how to use Wisper for pub/sub event-driven architecture in Rails. Clean up bloated controllers and models by decoupling business logic with the observe...

I’ve been using Rspec since 2012 and in all this time I’ve never had a really clear picture of how to best use . I don’t have this issue with any other aspect of Rspec. Probably our most common…

A curated directory of PostgreSQL extensions and tools. Replace Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and MongoDB with one database you already know.

What happens when your entire app rests on one developer's shoulders

Rails 7.1 deprecated secrets.yml in favor of encrypted credentials. Learn why the change happened and follow a step by step guide to migrate your app safely.

Turning a Claude skill audit report into a labelled, severity-tiered GitHub backlog, and what the skill found in a small Rails 8 app.

How SOLID changes when you read it through Ruby’s object model, duck typing, and preference for pragmatic design.

Watch the Builder Methods workshop — the plan-first method for building apps with AI that come out right the first time.

Tired of installing NodeJS and juggling version managers just to compile Rails assets? Learn how Bun’s standalone binary can make setup faster and simpler.

Move from "here's the story of the system" to "here's what's red and here's the intervention that makes sense for your situation."

This week I made a refactor to remove a job (ActiveJob::Base) that was used only in recurring.yml, and call a class method directly instead. Sometimes it is ok to have a job, but sometimes using the method can help you write a little less code. And...

Procman is a tool written in Rust that offers a TUI interface to manage processes defined in a Procfile.

What to do in the first 90 days after your Rails app gets acquired.

Playwright records every test in cinematic detail. Most Rails devs aren’t watching.