Happy to see Andre finally speaking publicly about the hostile Ruby Central takeover last year. RC is no longer a trustworthy steward for the Ruby community. I don't see how we repair this rift without Shan stepping down, she has been awful as ED. andre.arko.net/2026/03/03/f...

I have had some gigs like that: a CTO wants to do something that is scoped a well-suited for independent work (coordinated with anyone affected). It has to be done and can afford it, but the day to day eats them. You enter, do it, and shake hands.

TBH this is a good approach for any project - finish quickly and without incident. Don't ask permission for delivering quality work, either (however you want to define it). And make sure that each Friday, the entire team can walk away from the project, never to return, and it still has value.

In my experience, it's impossible to justify "paying down" tech debt to anyone outside your team's programmers, and even then it's iffy. Doing a bunch of work without changing the system is hard to quantify, perhaps even impossible. That said, cruft happens and needs to be dealt with. 2 strategies:

If the AI code generators are capable of adding any feature to any codebase then there is no longer such a thing as technical debt. Tech debt - if it matters at all - is only relevant to people writing code.

The Death of a Software Craftsman (it happens a lot 'round here) naildrivin5.com/blog/2026/02/2… AI Abstinence? All in on Agents? Or resign yourself to becoming a niche craftsperson?

@aeronautapp.com How do I "select" the most read message so that keyboard shortcuts navigate from there. e.g. If I come to the app after a day of not using it and hit j/k I'm navigating from whatever message I had focused a day ago. cmd+up does take me to the top, but then j/k again scrolls down

Aeronaut 1.6 is now available. This release adds support for selecting list items with the keyboard! • ▲ or K to move selection up • ▼ or J to move selection down • ↵ to perform the default action • ⌘J to go back to the selected item if you’ve scrolled it out of view • ⌘+click to deselect 1/2

Yes, I’ve had lots of requests for more keyboard shortcuts! These already work: • Scroll to top: ⌘+up-arrow • Switch tabs: ⌘1 through ⌘8 I’m planning to add a menu item for scroll to top to make it more discoverable. And arrow keys to move between posts is on my todo list.

I would love to understand why Synology decided to name this new version "$SAME_AS_CURRENT Update 1" instead of bumping the FIVE DIGIT PATCH NUMBER?!?!?!

Trying out @aeronautapp.com (was previously using a Safari web view of the Bluesky website). Much nicer, and look forward to whatever improvements they make.

The linked article is fucking depressing

Amazon's royalties always come in three transactions: deposit the amount I'm owed, then withdraw that exact same amount, then deposit that exact same amount again. Apple's and Kobo's royalties are deposited without incident, but almost no one seemingly buys tech books from them.

Every month, I reconcile my personal and business accounts + my dad's. Novo bank has the worst UX (and that's saying something). Their devs do not give a shit or know what they are doing. The ellipsis truncation in the middle of that whitespace just kills me every time.

Tax season approaches here in the US. The US government had a (legit) great idea to create a single sign-on for all government services. In typical US fashion, why build one when you can build two at twice the price? I have moved stuff to login dot gov, but the IRS only accepts ID dot me. Cool.

Using a search engine, we found 67 unsecured admin panels for Flock Safety cameras. The majority of them use AI to zoom in and follow people. I had both live and 31 days of archived footage from retail parking lots, forest trails, playgrounds, etc. @404media.co youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?...

Google could have chosen to promote recipe websites that show you a recipe and not someone's culinary journey. But they did not. ibid for literally everything. This is why an LLM trained on the internet is far superior to searching that same internet.

One of my design goals for https://brutrb.com is that requiring a file should never execute any code. It should always be totally safe to require a file without fear. https://adrs.cloud/shared_adrs/padr_03b5cf8e34bb7900a38f6de27e50adaa

One of my least favorite Ruby cultural norms is being so obsessive about users not having to learn how to configure a gem that the gem, just on being required by Bundler, sets up a lot of default configuration. Currently: honeybadger sets up very slow at_exit hooks if you don't configure it not to

I have a Yamaha MT8x (30 years old) that has been repaired once and needs repair again. Probably more in repairs than it cost. I also have a Tascam Porta02 (35 years old) that was serviced by a pro before I bought but I still have had to replace two belts in it. Neither has parametric EQ or XLR in

NGL, I could do with less building new things and changing shit. We need more people wanting to make existing things incrementally better.

I really wish working in IT for the US Government was different. There are so many interesting problems to work on and a million easy ways to make people's lives better or at least not worse. Example: Census. I got a letter to fill it out. I did. Then I got another letter

A tale of trying to pay a medical bill in the US of A: 1. Get a paper bill in the mail. It contains no clear indication of what the bill is for, and is from a company you definitely did not interact with to get healthcare. Hopefully, your doctor's name is on it so you have some clue.

I have this pathological desire to block the domains of all spammers. I even go into my spam folder and do this. Spam Zero. Looking at the domains, I wonder if blocking all .us would be fine. Almost every spam is from «random characters».us

knob? Is that an en_GB thing?

@profanity.accountant how am I doing?

This pathological payment pattern I can't wrap my head around why it exists, because it just happened with STRIPE, who should know better: 1) default method is expired and has failed, 2) add new method, charge goes through, 3) expired payment method is still default, fails next time.

Just spent the last week on a fancy TUI library for https://brutrb.com and it almost works, but is janky in a lot of ways and I think it's at the point where I have to basically nuke it and start over. This is the "one to throw away" but I really don't want to write all this again.

Our industry’s obsession with preventing programmers from ever being inconvenienced feels truly user hostile. Shit doesn’t need changing as frequently as we think. It’s ok to think through and plan stuff. Just because the CEO hired a bunch of programmers doesn’t mean they must be 100% utilized.

1 hour into getting 1password + firefox to work. Main sticking point so far is getting it to start when I log in. It just always produces a crash dialog, but then seems to actually start. (Please don't tell me about other password managers, I'm not switching)

The final boss of every Linux install is — get my 4-in-1 printer/scanner/copier/fax working.

I've probably posted this before, but copy/paste shortcuts are super important to me, and I think any long-time mac user would feel the same way. Knowing that whatever app you are in can be copied/pasted with the same key everywhere is hugely empowering

I have some downtime and am revisiting "Make Linux Remotely Usable for a Long Time Mac Person". Step 1 is "make Firefox respond to mac-like key shortcuts" and…xremap!! 100% works. GETTING it to work is a byzantine nightmare the exemplifies why Linux on the desktop will never ever ever be a thing.

I initially bought into "software craftsmanship", but soon soured on it, as it seemed to be couched as moral imperative, not a practical/outcome-based one. But now that LLMs allow a lot of rank&file devs to get work done in a much more industrialized way, I'm wondering if "craft" has new meaning?

If I'm understanding this Cloudflare thing right, it looks like the smug use† of monads took down the entire internet? †is there any other kind?

I'm usually pretty emotionally, even? But I just made the final update to Sustainable Rails and have taken it out of print. It doesn't feel good, even though it is the right call for me. I enjoyed writing&updating the book over the years & the advice it contains is still highly recommended. But…

Looking at Rails 8.1 to update https://sustainable-rails.com. The CI stuff is…really poorly designed IMO. What was something that could be created, managed, and expanded using shell scripts is now an inflexible DSL that I'm guessing most teams will jettison immediately.

I don't need much from my iPhone, really, but being notified when a contact calls me or when I get a text would be awesome. I have a sneaking suspicion that installing RoboKiller - to the tune of $80 - is why I no longer get notifications for most calls/texts.

Reason # 467 to not rely on software produced by 37 Signals: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/issues/1456 My only surprise is that David Rails didn't just post a picture of the fuck you slide and actually wrote a response

I was on the Dead Code Podcast talking about https://brutrb.com (and a bit about #looptober and synths). Had a good convo about why Brut is currently the way it is and where it might go.

Take two of my interview with @davetron5000.com. We talk alternative Ruby web frameworks, synthesizers, and how Rails might be easy, but it's not necessarily simple. shows.acast.com/dead-code/ep...

the former maintainers of Bundler and RubyGems have a proposal: we want to move Ruby forward andre.arko.net/2025/10/26/w...

I wrote my most personal blog post to date. It summarizes some of my personal feelings and experiences in the Ruby/Rails community. afomera.dev/posts/2025-1...

I use a modified version where I set `$debug` in a test causing an issue, then check it in the code to put debugging info

Current Status: 529 payment to my nephew's school lost in mail, $250 late fee. Cool. Meanwhile, DME wants to swap batteries on my Dad's power chair which would leave him immobile for 1-2 months while we wait. Problem is the power cable, not batteries. Cool.

#looptober Oct 7 - I think I need to master/normalize these - they seem really quiet. Loving the TR-8, which I discovered has the 7x7 drum machines in it!

Oops, forgot the link re: bsky.app/profile/dave... ephemeral5000.bandcamp.com/track/oct-6

Re: musical gear, I realized that I don't care about "analog warmth" - I need the immediacy of being able to grab a knob and turn it and have it do something (what's called "knob-per-function"). Programming analogy here:

The music I make (e.g. in #looptober) is all "dawless", so only hardware synths/sequencers. To quickly remind myself what they can do and avoid going into the manuals on my phone, I made a PWA generator to capture quick docs/cheatsheets for each synth.

#looptober for Oct 6, this time with more techno (I think?) sounds. I just got a TR-8, and the combo of it + the Drumbrute Impact sounds great in my headphones. Steampipe is packed up & awaiting my listing on Reverb. I was also going to sell my Microfreak, but I think I might try harder to love it.