🔖 Bookmarks

Ractors are now viable in production, and it’s time for Rails to embrace them. In this post, we explain why — what Ractors unlock for Rails applications, and the first milestone we’re aiming for in the framework.

Learn how the strangler fig pattern lets teams modernize legacy Rails apps gradually, reducing technical debt without a risky all-at-once rewrite.

Two developer opinions Rails vs JavaScript for modern marketing sites, with AI-generated code shaping stack choice, costs, and maintenance.

Status starts as a column. Then someone asks “who was denied last Tuesday?” and the schema can’t answer. Model each status change as its own row from the start, without sacrificing read performance.

cssbundling-rails 1.4.3 misdetects Yarn projects as Bun when Bun is on PATH, breaking asset precompilation. Here is why it happens and how to unblock it.

One block in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md that makes coding agents write throwaway scripts in Ruby instead of Python or bash, so you stay the reviewer instead of a rubber stamp

Why native apps have become privacy liabilities, and why the browser is almost always the better choice.

Not every AI solution needs to be a custom agent. How I built an MCP server and Claude Code plugin for our blog writing process in about ten hours.

RSpec Expectations: You’re Probably Using the Wrong Matcher August 3, 2026 If you’ve been writing Ruby tests for a while, chances are you’ve reached for eq more times than you can…

Using RSpec's functionality expressively helps to draw focus to the right parts of a test, but it's not always easy to understand how best to use it.

In Geometry Dash, the cube spins through the air and always lands flush on a flat side. It looks like careful rigid-body physics. It isn’t, and the real trick is much simpler.

Learn why your Sidekiq jobs are slower than you expect and how to pinpoint N+1 queries, missing indexes, Redis spikes, and more with AppSignal.

A hands-on guide to instrumenting LLM calls in a Rails app using the Rails 8.1 Event Reporter, so you can track token usage, latency, and cost per request.

Learn about ES6 classes, Maps, MutationObserver and WeakMaps by building Stimulus' controller system from scratch.

When I joined Cheddar I was pleasantly surprised to find a sharp, mostly minimalist development culture which was a pleasant departure from the ZIRP-era “platform and team sprawl” that was in full bloom at WeTransfer. The mostly-Shopify-inspired mindset - the Shopify of roughly 2012-2014, when Bouke and Tariq were there, long before the sharded-the-world Shopify of today - was extremely poignant and felt like a breath of fresh air: Let’s not have services, at most - we’ll have 2 Let’s not have Kubernetes and use GCP native VM scaling instead Let’s not have frontend bundling of any kind and rely on Rails builtins for any internal web plumbing Since then I took this approach to heart, and furthered it even when Bouke left for Monumental, and Emil chose for greener pastures as well. Time and time again, when we were faced with adding more systems and services to the stack, we resisted - and while I can’t prove we were right (we never ran the branch of history where we caved), not once did we later sit around wishing we had the extra stuff. So what is it that made stuff my biggest enemy, and why should you consider joining the cause?

How to write a Claude Code skill that automates tech debt audits for Rails applications, combining security, dependencies, coverage, and complexity.

A practical rundown of tools, settings, and habits that reduce token consumption when using Claude Code as your daily AI coding assistant.

Checking whether you've seen something before usually means storing everything you've seen. A Bloom filter does it in about ten bits per item and can only be wrong in one direction. This post builds from a single bit to the structure RocksDB and Cassandra use to skip disk reads.

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.