Hopped on a call yesterday to chat running businesses. Be glue. Measure progress. Batteries included. Reduce risk. Fractional FTW. Design products to save people time. Design your business to free your own time. www.johnnunemaker.com/self-made-i...

Small improvement for Fireside. You can now import chapters from text. Easy copy/paste from whatever you use to generate your chapters.

Started using Ice menu bar manager (mac) recently and it's great. github.com/jordanbaird...

Fun read. How to use imap/pop3 with action mailbox via stdin: medium.com/code-and-co...

Friends don't let friends waste milliseconds. Another endpoint enfastenated.

Good architecture is invisible until it saves you. Great example is flipper’s adapter pattern. Can move from db to cache to whatever storage you want with little effort.

Rails made me love code. Postgres made me love data.

We're shipping a brand new renderer at box out hosted on @railway. Seeing the old AWS one go to zero requests is HUGE. This is step 1 and should save us $1k/mo. Step 2 is motion graphics which will save $3-4k/mo in GPU servers. Huge team effort moving ~1k templates in 2 two days.

Trends come and go. SQL endures. Amazing longevity and usefulness.

I’ve worked on apps doing millions of rails request per minute and never intentionally used foreign keys.

Normalize until it hurts. Denormalize until it works.

Rails generators were the AI of the past. Type a few things and boom your app works. 😆

When your life size mascot is the only decoration you have in your office…

Railway feels like heroku did in 2010 — magical.

My first rails app was 2006. Tracked where propane tanks were set, leaks, etc. Somehow got it to work and made a couple grand. Bought a home in ‘19 with propane tank (for barn). Finally understood what that app did. 😂 Shut the app down a 2 years ago in favor of a google sheet. It had a good run.

Every Rails app I’ve touched since 2005 still has that comforting app/models directory. Like home.

I feel seen.

You don’t need the “perfect Rails architecture.” You need 100 deploys this month. Speed creates feedback. Feedback creates money. Volume beats perfection. Every time.

Winners ship. Losers debate.

Testing isn’t about writing more tests — it’s about identifying the 20% of bugs that cause 80% of the problems for customers and making sure there aren't regressions.

I'm quickly becoming a massive @railway fan. Spun up a staging environment to test some docker stuff in minutes today. It's low key awesome once you "get it".

Other frameworks make you feel smart. Rails makes you feel powerful.

Rails is the framework where weekend hacks turn into companies.

rails new is still one of the happiest commands in programming.

Controllers don’t get messy. They get rich with business logic.

Nothing says “rails veteran” like remembering vendor/plugins.

before_action :authenticate_user! is the duct tape holding half the internet together.

Explaining ActiveRecord to juniors: it’s SQL, but prettier. Explaining ActiveRecord to seniors: it’s SQL, but sneakier.

First there was Peepcode. Then Railscasts. Now GoRails. Many people have made a great living creating video education for rails devs.

If you still type rake instead of rails, you’re a Rails OG.

I’m like a kid sleeping in their new shoes. Except I’m hacking from the porch of our new camper. Just parked at my house but this’ll do.

Notepad => Dreamweaver => Textmate => Sublime => Atom => VS Code => Cursor.

If you’ve ever argued about haml vs erb, you might be entitled to financial compensation.

Hot of the press yesterday, new feature at box out. Custom branded pages. Kinda stepping back into the CMS ring with this ship. boxoutsports.com/features/cu...

I love our blog. Learn so much from it. It's always worth paying for good valuable content.

“A good programmer is not someone who writes a lot of code, but someone who avoids unnecessary code.”

this quote has been on my mind: “Code is read more often than it is written — optimize for the reader, not the writer.“ LLMs are optimized to write more than to create readable code for humans. My approach: vibe pairing - the LLM generates the code but I still add taste.

I always forget to use clamp but today I remembered. (ENV["EVENTS_BACKEND_LIMIT"].presence || 500).to_i.clamp(100, 2000) Ensures that no matter what the ENV var is set to, we end up with a number between 100 and 2000.

I've completely switched from Macwhisper to Wispr flow for dictating and its awesome. Macwhisper was using up my battery in like 2 hours even when I wasn't dictating. Wispr flow is light and accurate.

I'm not one to regularly post about watches on here but this is too cool. The MB&F M.A.D. 2 arrived while I was camping out west and I picked it up the first night when I got home. I've had it on for 4 days straight. It wears amazing and is quite the looker.

To all the John's out there using @claudeai...

Finally home from summer camping and got to work at momentum (entrepreneurship hub I’m an owner in) for the first time yesterday. Love the vibe. Best coffee in town.

Ended up chopping 75% off our ci time from 16-20 minutes down to 4 using parallel_tests and heroku ci multi dyno formation (2 for now). Now it’s time for brats!

It's almost 5 o'clock on Friday and I'm sitting here outside my camper (on vacation) cutting box out's CI times in half. 😎 Making graphs go down is how I relax.

Teaching my father in law the ways of AI via ChatGPT. People hear AI and freak out but when they see simple uses in practice it blows their minds.

You write tests to catch bugs. You use feature flags to survive them in production.

The best Rails devs don’t write clever code. They write boring code that never breaks.

Using feature flags is like having an “undo” button for your deploys.

Rack middleware is so awesome. I love the idea of adding to the env for downstream consumers. flipper and flipper cloud do it like crazy to work together efficiently. Just added a middleware to tag all appsignal requests with the requesting flipper gem version, ruby version, etc.

Pro tip: if you delete a bunch of data from mysql on @planetscale, you have to force a rewrite to actually free the space up. You can do it as easily as make a branch, ALTER TABLE telemetry_requests COMMENT 'Optimize table size - 2025-07-12';, create deploy request and done.