What if automation were about care, not code? And what if doing less made teams more effective? These bold questions shaped our latest #ChicagoRubyMeetup 🔥 Talks from doodling.dev & jremsikjr.bsky.social 📺 Watch the full recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RsW...

Feedback isn’t one-time—it’s continuous. #ValidateBeforeDuringAfter buff.ly/mNw9ldP

So aptly said! I’d prefer an early-career dev every time

I'm looking for stories about how AI is killing creative work, and I'd love to hear from you—artists, writers, illustrators, actors, designers, editors, voice actors and narrators—if your job or practice has been hit. This is going to be a big one. [email protected]

Anyone within the range of coming to get it in Chicago want a Glowforge Pro? I’ve given up on getting money for it and mostly I’d prefer it goes to someone who will continue to be creative with it 🥺

those thinking about speaking or are about to speak: Everyone in the room with you wants you to succeed. It might feel like they’re waiting for you to fail, but they took time out of their lives for this, everyone IS pulling for you. Be as cynical as you can, 👆 that’s what falls out.

I think we finally found a succinct answer for the “why Edinburgh?” Question? It won’t work with everyone, but I think it’ll hit enough of the time. ⭐️ It feels like pre-tech San Francisco

If you don’t know the context: I declared Aaron Patterson the Railsconf World Champion in my keynote, and then Aaron said “Aji, I lost Railsconf” in his..so by the transitive property Drew has declared me world champion. He was on the program committee so I think it’s official.

AC/DC is playing in Edinburgh where we are for a bit and we started talking, ‘oh this song…and that song…and that song!’ And I’m realizing…”have I been a huge AC/DC fan **this whole time??**”

Congratulations to HUNTR/X for being the first K-Pop girl group to top Billboard’s Top 100! “Golden” is a masterpiece and to anyone who says “but they’re not a real band” I have one word for you… “Gorillaz”

Denmark remembering human beings.

I wonder if part of why the management class is so in love with generative “art” is because they’ve never had real control over the output. Someone else did it and the best they could do is give feedback, and usually not very good feedback without the vocabulary to do so.

@polotek.bsky.social- recently I keynoted at Railsconf, having watched all the keynotes of all the Railsconfs to keynote about said keynotes’ contents. I wanted to let you know that your 2017 talk is super important to me, and had a pivotal place in my presentation. 50:40 if you’d like the timestamp

@tenderlove.dev I found your next project!

Are you a Ruby developer from Amsterdam? thoughtbot is having our company summit in your beautiful city this year in October and I’d love to meet and hang out with y’all…or even better if we serendipitously landed when there’s a regular meetup, I’ll bring some bots!

Maybe the real Ship of Theseus was the Ship of Theseus we made along the way

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Turnaround in record time, the Railsconf 2025 talks have been published! If you missed my keynote in person: here’s your opportunity. Now excuse me while I go binge all the talks I missed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-lq...

"Although AI removes the majority of the grunt work from programming, it doesn't remove the necessity to think about system design, understand business requirements, and create maintainable and secured systems" The type of developers most excited by vibe coding didn't do this stuff BEFORE AI.

I love how study after study after study shows that simply giving people financial stability and free time with no strings attached leads to better outcomes for *everybody*, and yet society keeps rejecting that solution by saying, "But then how would poor people know to be ashamed of themselves???"

this is such a perfect illustration of the fundamental disconnect between what LLMs are and how they are sold and how people interact with them it’s not a person, it does not “know” things, it does not remember and learn from things the way a person does it is predicting what someone might say

I was working though boot.dev because I got a free month. The second or third project is to create a gen AI coding agent. The last thing it did was to fix a bug by replacing the entire program with a print statement that printed the expected answer to fix the bug and removed all other functionality

Just came from the incredible Blackpink show in Chicago. Both amazingly fun and also an intense source of gender dysphoria. But also…it f*ckin’ rocked!

tech as an industry sucks right now but i wanna voice appreciation for all of the humble technologists who have stuck to their principles and turned down bigger paychecks and “better” roles—often without praise—in service of doing work that matters. i see you

Not the point but I fucking hate the trend of pinning or holding the wireless lav pack instead of a discrete lav mic. Looks stupid and sloppy

Regarding dresses and gender: When a man puts on a dress, he's still a man. When a trans woman takes off a dress, she's still a woman. When a nonbinary person wears a dress, they are WTF they say they are, and they look damn good in that dress.

After an amazing week at the final RailsConf in Philadelphia it’s been almost nothing but catching up on the Tour de France and recharging batteries

If I knew the answer to "how do we get more women into <insert STEM related thing here>" I'd have made my fortune selling the idea*. So just because I AM a woman in STEM pls stop asking. *actually I do have an idea but it involves dismantling the patriarchy and no one is willing to hear that

Ah yes, a politics of national victimhood with nostalgia for a lost golden age. Famously punk.

I promised a list of the Keynotes I watched for my Railsconf talk “Keynote of Keynotes” with links to the videos and here it is: my Keynote of Keynote Keynotes List Gist. gist.github.com/DoodlingDev/...

I’ve been saying this for a while now. And I’m still judging people who are impressed by AI.

I have an amendment, or an addendum. This is what it feels like to get together with Ruby Friends always 🤗☺️

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

I do not yet live in the UK so cannot sign this. I know people in the UK follow me, would you take a minute to sign and I’ll buy you a drink/coffee/cupcake when I get over there?

I’m hosting a community gathering at the Sheraton Lobby bar at 5pm, today! I’ve always enjoyed conversational diverse events at RailsConf, so let’s have one, one last time. I’ll put a little money behind the bar so come along, have a drink on me, and make some Ruby friends! #railsconf

"The problem with AI isn't that it can do your job. It can't. The problem with AI is that your MBA-brained boss's boss doesn't know how your job works and thinks AI can do your job at fractions of a penny on the dollar, and hears the siren song of 'maximize shareholder value'." MBA-brain is real.

Even linkedin gets it

so all you're doing _right now_ by using LLMs is harming people, and the planet, and making a lot of busywork for yourself for the promise of better times that would happen anyway. I know it feels productive for you. But that's really not what the studies are showing, including by the Big Cos

we ship everywhere! booksmith.com xoxo

Dunno if I mentioned it, but I like drawing Jubilee. #xmen #jubilee #comics #fanart

Brilliant assholes don’t exist because brilliance is a property of a collective group of people and nobody wants to work with assholes. Brilliant asshole is just another phrase for “walking liability that damages everything they touch” Ain’t nothing brilliant about that

It is really really sinking in for me the degree to which LLMs are the ultimate expression of right wing anti-intellectualism. Its proponents are literally mocking the idea that anyone would ever want to learn anything, know anything, develop any actual skill, or have a thought of their own.

"First responders" needs to be abolished from style guides because its purpose is to smuggle cops into a category that includes EMTs and firefighters. The phrase is deliberate copaganda that allows abusers to borrow an aura of respectability from other groups.

Not great that all of the descriptions of someone “impersonating” law enforcement are just descriptions of what law enforcement are currently doing in our streets

We have entered the "The police is saying that if the police is at your door you are not safe call the police immediately" stage of making America great again

Deep Blue is 30 years old and was capable of defeating chess grand champions. It could be housed in a single cabinet. ChatGPT spans untold data centers devouring massive amounts of electricity and it got its ass whipped by an 8 bit gaming console from the 1970s.

Google is raising my Google Workspace pricing claiming all the “AI value” added. I turned off Gemini in Gmail and Docs because it just doesn’t work / do anything useful for me. So why am I being charged more? Having costs b/c of AI is not the same as generating value with AI…