Ross Kaffenberger

I’m available for hire. I’m an experienced Ruby, TypeScript and CSS engineer looking for a new full-time position. I can help you with performance, concurrency, testing, architecture and API design problems on tooling or product teams. I’d really appreciate any personal introductions. DMs open. 🙏

One thing I loved about DarkSky is to get an idea of what the weather is usually like in some location at a given time of year. What’s a good app for that these days?

What a game. Whatever happens in the second half, it has been awesome to see my hometown Washington Commanders good at football again. #Commanders #Lions

To give you some idea on how fast I am to adopt new tech, my car has a CD player

If you want to take your Rails career to the next level, you need to start digging into Rails. Don't sleep on becoming a better code reader, it's a force multiplier (ask me how I know lol). Sign up here: lu.ma/dv5yvj4n

I made a thing to help you visualize how Ruby’s Lazy Enumerator works, so your code can do less work. joyofrails.com/articles/sim...

2024 ended up a pretty solid writing year for me. Here are the top 10 posts by views. Of them, 8 were written in 2024 (tanstack and pgbouncer have had alot of staying power, they're from 2023). I'll link to each after this, in case you'd like to check them out!

A few seasons in and my biggest takeaway so far is pretty much everyone in The Sopranos is a horrible person.

All Hans really wanted was to be sitting on a beach, earning 20%

This was fun. Not bad considering my place of work doesn’t use GitHub. git-wrapped.com/profiles/ros...

100% I say both “sequel” and “S-Q-L”. Context matters.

Edited the post a little to provide a little more context and be a little less harsh. www.konnorrogers.com/posts/2024/e...

Currently working on an in-browser demo to help visualize the difference between eager and lazy enumeration in Ruby

Interested in learning test case design? Discover how to identify what to test, reduce the number of tests, and write less code while covering more logic. Join my #GoodEnoughWorkshop on January 23 or 24, 2024.

More Ruby/Rails hacker news!! Also I am blown away with what @nodunayo.bsky.social has done on her own. Her RubyConf keynote was so good too! youtu.be/pOW4vepSX8g

Rails really is the One-Person Framework

And today, @nodunayo.bsky.social is #1 on HN for her Brighton Ruby @thestorygraph.com talk. Congrats, Nadia for your software, business, and speaking accomplishments!

Great to see @adrienpoly.com and @marcoroth.dev with Ruby Video trending on trending on HN today after the Ruby Concurrency talk by @jpcamara.com hit the top spot yesterday. Ruby’s having a good run right now and it’s not even Christmas yet!

Powered by Rails and Hotwire! github.com/rubyapi/ruby...

The new Ruby docs are looking great. The search feature is fast. New experimental features appear to be in the works too, like type signatures and runnable code examples. Awesome stuff!

Made some nice improvements to the Lighthouse score for the Joy of Rails homepage today. Biggest different was optimizing the article illustrations.

The source of the twitter-ruby gem was where I first discovered Ruby’s to_enum and Enumerator. A cool detail of the gem: you can iterate over paginated resources with Ruby .each while pages are fetched transparently. This still blows my mind 🤯 github.com/sferik/twitt...

I love Ruby so much that I write my HTML in Ruby. I’ve got nothing against ERb, but after a year of writing Phlex components, I’m not looking back.

It’s such a simple thing, but I love that Ruby treats the backslash character as a line continuation, similar to a shell. I often use it to omit parens and group keyword arguments on new line.

Let’s see how Solid Cable on SQLite holds up. I spent this week building realtime polls. I embedded the first one in my last article (unfortunately after the publish date). joyofrails.com/articles/wha...

Cuprite is a really good driver for system tests. I haven’t been able to blame my Capybara driver for a flaky test in the past few years now since I switched. Say no Selenium. @janko.io wrote more about it. janko.io/upgrading-fr...

I used Current Attributes in my Rails project today to avoid some “prop drilling”. It felt dirty but it worked. “Current” is a bit like React Context. Good tool to know but shouldn’t be overused. api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Acti...

I was hoping someone would show how Ruby can do better than bddicken/languages indicates with optimizations like YJIT. @jpcamara.com delivers with this deep dive into Ruby nested loop performance complete with JS visualizations, exploration of machine code, and proof that Ruby can be faster than C.

Hotwire docs at hotwired.dev are really good for understanding its features in vanilla HTML and JS. But I would love more Rails-focused content in the Hotwire docs or Rails guides. I currently need to jump between various sources incl. the turbo-rails ruby docs: www.rubydoc.info/gems/turbo-r...

I like organize my Tailwind classes by function with line breaks and tabs. I find it easier to read for excessively long class names. But I find ERB formatting support in VS Code a bit lacking at the moment. What do you use?

Just because I think SQLite works great for Joy of Rails doesn’t mean it’s right for you. You may be wondering: "Is SQLite a good fit for my next Rails app?" I’ve set out to help you answer that question here: joyofrails.com/articles/wha... #sqlite #rails

Just because I think SQLite works great for Joy of Rails doesn’t mean it’s right for you. You may be wondering: "Is SQLite a good fit for my next Rails app?" I’ve set out to help you answer that question here: joyofrails.com/articles/wha... #sqlite #rails