Toby

The number of git commit messages I've seen cursing out safari for its perpetual miscreant behaviour is incredibly high.

Imagine having this job. I guess I'm pretty stoked to be pissing off the people who are actively making my country uninhabitable.

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Imagine spending an amount of money that could solve American homelessness for 3-4 years on detention centers for people who are generally busy working, renting, parenting, and paying taxes.

It's astonishing to me that we just so willingly gave up on being able to select text to copy in so many apps? Granted, the text selection on mobile has always been substandard, but the fact that so few apps allow selection of text in so many places is infuriating.

chickenshits www.theverge.com/policy/85990...

Every time I think a boolean is sufficient, some new feature pushes it toward an enum, or some kind of multiple timestamps. Every, damn, time

As annoying as this AWS outage has been, it's a warning signal to engineering teams across the globe that our reliance on monopolistic cloud providers is bad for business

I keep thinking about an interaction with one of the major ai tools recently: [me] How to do x? [llm] Have you tried y? [me] Ok, I just tried y, it didn't work. [llm] I see you tried y, that's how you fix x, what else can I help you with?

in case you're not sure who dhh is, he's a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like "i am smarter than you" and "foreigners bad" rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast

what a humiliating way for don jr. to find out his dad sends birthday cards.

Eliminating the headphone jack did this to society.

A thing I think we miss is that the “authoritarian playbook” isn’t a set of instructions authoritarians are reading from, it’s just a list of things that happen when narcissists get too much power.

Absolutely incredible turnout for Budapest Pride! So proud of all the organizers, including some old friends, who estimate hundreds of thousands— major embarrassment to Orban

Starting to lose count of the number of times I spin up a new app to try out a new JS framework, and realize that I really prefer vanilla JS, and that their abstraction is too much mental overhead for my productivity

With tariffs throwing international shipping into chaos, it’s only a matter of time before the toilet paper wars return right?

Trusting in your web framework’s magic is like swiping a credit card, smooth and effortless upfront, but the bill always arrives. Sometimes when your app scales, other times just when you color outside the lines

Why do get the feeling the next decade of software engineering is just gonna be cleaning up the crusty spaghetti left behind by someone who 'vibe coded' their way into production at 2am in an over-caffeinated stupor?

Melbourne Airport: Agent: "Your carry-on is over the limit, that will be $42." Man: "Why is that so important? It’s only just over." Agent: "We need to stay under the weight, this is very important to the safety of your flight." Man: "It can’t be that important if you’re not weighing us!"

Bumper sticker that says, "Bought after the pedo diver thing... during the Grimes thing... you know what, this is on me. My bad"

After converting a personal project to Hanami, it blows my mind how elegantly it solves many issues I've faced with other frameworks. Bravo! I'm going to have to migrate some much larger projects over

As much as I love the aesthetics of symbol keys in a ruby hash, the mix of symbols and strings in ruby hashes in different projects can be a genuine nightmare. Pick a lane people!

[open source repo with zero updates for 6 months] "Clearly abandonware!" [personal repo with zero updates for 4 years] "This is fine."

It's rarely pointed out, but no country in history has ever willingly given up as much power and influence as the USA just did. Nation states crave power and influence. They seek to build it, and work hard at not losing any. But here the US is going hog wild on losing as much of it as possible.

We often judge a company's success by its profits and stock price, but most people probably care more about its minimum and median wages. After all, if planning on spending money there, it's good to know you're not just contributing to income inequality.

My nvim LSP has been broken for a week now, and honestly? I haven’t rushed to fix it. Turns out, there’s a certain serenity in coding without an overzealous autocomplete breathing down my neck. No little suggestions. No judgmental squiggly lines. Just me, code, and occasional linting issue in PR's

One underrated perk of living in the EU: when most of your app's users are in the US, you can deploy while they’re asleep. Rails update? Ruby update? No problem, something breaks, you’ve got time to revert before anyone notices.

The more time I spend running sql queries the more I realize that the boolean column is almost always a mistake. visible, enabled, active should almost always be a datetime: marked_visible_at, marked_enabled_at, marked_active_at

On the topic of alt ruby frameworks, Roda has been my favorite Ruby framework for a while. I've used it in projects of all sizes. Here’s a Roda/Phlex/Sequel/esbuild template that I’ve been using to make it easier to spin up larger projects github.com/tobyond/roda...

Replacing ActiveStorage with Shrine in our main app. ActiveStorage's variant handling in the db is overly complex, and our app relies heavily on variants. Shrine is a pure joy so far, loving the switch!

Sometimes I get super stoked at how few dependencies we have on our main production rails app, then deployments fail and I see the whole slew of CI and deployment dependencies

I love rails, but I also love javascript. Sometimes it feels like the framework has done everything in its power to not embrace it.

Every year around this time, I'm amazed that the same person who created some of the greatest songs ever also managed to write what is objectively the worst Christmas song, and a contender for one of the worst songs of all time.

Almost hit 60 books this year. Highlights: Current: NEXUS by Yuval Noah Harari The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Classics: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons Fantasy: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree Percepliquis by Michael J. Sullivan

Stripe’s developer experience vs. PayPal’s is almost comical: Me: "Hey, can I get all refunds from the past year with transaction details?" Stripe: "Sure, here you go!" PayPal: "Nope. Only 31 days at a time, special permissions needed, and good luck finding docs!"

I much prefer multi-word Ruby gem names to be hyphenated rather than camel cased, even though camel case seems to be more common

Taking the week to improve test coverage on our main app and manage to discover the origin of an intermittent bug we've been hunting for years!

I find it interesting how many Rails projects end up being RDD, Rubocop Driven Design. Entire days of development time can go into refactoring just to satisfy the linter

who's gonna build me atproto instagram, man? every single interaction in that app sucks to use. you can actively feel zuckerberg fighting you whenever you try to do anything other than look at brands

My biggest takeaway from 2024? Apparently, I’m a "light mode" text editor guy now. Apologies to everyone I silently judged for this in the past

2024 has been the year of culling dependencies. I’ve removed more gems and packages from our app this year than ever. It usually starts with, "What do we even use this for?" and ends with replacing it with a simple class. Rinse and repeat. Here’s to more of the same in 2025!

I wish github were more context aware: "You're merging into main and deploying close to a holiday or a weekend. Want to auto-create a revert PR, just in case?"

You open the "legacy" Rails app for the first time and find models full of callbacks—ugh. Then you see those callbacks packed with conditionals—double ugh. So this is why callbacks are so maligned!

This year, I finally got our main prod app to use jemalloc, and the memory savings are incredible. Along with a few other optimizations, our AWS bill is now 33% of what it was last year. I’m not a fan of DevOps, and any day NOT spent in AWS is a good day, but I almost enjoyed this work

Some days, I wish I had a time machine to share lotto numbers with my past self. Other days, I’d use it to warn past me not to go all in with Hotwire, split the front end with more JavaScript, and maybe even (gasp) pick a JS framework for the complex pages. Today is a day for the latter