Ruby Central said some really concerning things today. I don’t think they’re representing the situation accurately. andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/t...

As a software developer, if you do not genuinely believe in the value of what the people who pay your bills are producing, you have a moral responsibility to seek alternate work long term. This is not to deny the reality of how complicated that will be for most, and long term may mean years […]

In June, we proposed new Terms of Service for registered users of on our mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers. We did not do enough to consider the full impact of the terms, and the community was very clear that we needed to reconsider. We've done that over the past few months. Today […]

"Half Right", or... the most dangerous place to be when working with any technology. https://skillstopractice.com/posts/half-right

This is perhaps going to sound a bit strange but part of what makes code so unnatural to read is its lack of distinct shapes. A hammer looks like a hammer. A saw looks like a saw. A screwdriver, a screwdriver. It's pretty important for humans to have a clear hand->eye->brain connection. We […]

I am informed that the rubygems leaders who were ousted in the coup have regrouped at https://gem.coop/ with a new gems server.

announcing a new community-focused gem server from the team previously behind rubygems: gem.coop. join us and start using it today!

If new people are coming go check out those #introduction posts and do some boosting. We need to build an ever wider, more inclusive network. If there's something that sets the fediverse apart is that we can build authentic social relationships here. This isn't just a surrogate of old media […]

Ruby Central has posted their weekly update: https://rubycentral.org/news/weekly-update-friday-october-3/#how-to-engage I do recommend sending questions in to them. None were answered in this update, but we'll see if they get addressed in future updates. If you are not comfortable with the […]

One tactical error I think we're making by addressing "Rails Core" is that collective groups never can take responsibility. Their names (according to rubyonrails.org) are Jeremy, Aaron, Xavier, Rafael, Guillermo, Carlos, Matthew, Eileen, Ryuta, Jean, and John. Do you know and like any of these […]

The "Questions for Ruby Central" repository I set up for people to go on record with what they're asking Ruby Central got its first pull request, which I've merged. See the newly added questions here: https://github.com/community-research-on-ruby-governance/questions-for-ruby-central And then […]

I like the idea of lobste.rs but have never gone and went to create an account there. I'd like to now. Does anyone have a spare invite?

Old articles and blog posts too often get removed from the web or neglected, left to rot on broken pages. Replanting lets you migrate legacy content to your current site so it can thrive again. Here's how I'm doing it... https://cybercultural.com/p/replanting/ #replanting #savetheweb

These are very good questions and I hope someone submits them to Ruby Central and then logs them in the public record repository. https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1nw17fn/comment/nhdlz58/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@NeoNacho/115302738985783377 Putting caps on overconsumption and corporate freeloading would bring costs way down. Both for hosting and for maintaining operations. I agree decentralized packaging is a more complete fix. But we shouldn't throw away the commons and […]

The README for the repository I set up has some details on why I think a public record is important for any Q+A with Ruby Central. See the screenshot below for details. And to add your own questions, go here: https://github.com/community-research-on-ruby-governance/questions-for-ruby-central

RE: https://mastodon.social/@skillstopractice/115304263170586350 The idea behind this is simple. If you send your questions to Ruby Central and also post them in public, the community as a whole will be able to see who is asking what questions, and which questions Ruby Central answers fully vs […]

I assume Ruby Central will read everything sent to their "Community Feedback Box" and possibly even discuss internally what if anything to do about feedback they receive. That said, their recent track record reflects a lack of transparency that is wildly inappropriate for being in an official […]

@floppy Please see: https://mastodon.social/@skillstopractice/115301601297613653 Before I set a repo up for something like this myself, any interest in adding it as a QUESTIONS.md file or similar in Plan Vert instead? I know it would give you all more pull requests to approve and is on a […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jcoglan/115300006913927427 I found the latest update from Ruby Central to be especially insidious. 1) Tons of process details are "transparency" in a way, but not on the parts that were hidden in the shadows to begin with. 2) The flip flop on "sponsor pressure" […]

Being kind is more important than being nice. Assuming good intentions when dealing with people who have established patterns of abuse is an abdication of responsibility. People with different values and worldviews can work together, but some values and worldviews are fundamentally […]

@skillstopractice PyCharm and the PyCharm course from JetBrains Academy is a good start. https://blog.jetbrains.com/education/2020/03/05/jetbrains-academy-python/

What's the best learning resource you know of for someone learning Python? Both free and paid materials are welcome, as well both as things that are meant for people brand new to programming as well as things meant for experienced developers who just haven't learned Python yet.

I like this meme that was RT'd by DHH. He sees himself as a powerful god looking down on an irrelevant noise. I see someone refusing to give in despite the power differential, even if they don't have a hope, and you know what, I'm totally happy with that.

I just signed the open letter to the Rails Core team, after hesitating for a long time about whether that was the right choice for me. I know and like several Rails core members, as well as several Basecamp employees. I understand the squeeze that can happen when speaking out individually only […]

Suppose you are the proud owner of a company valued at 50,000,000 USD. You and 3999 friends who each own equally valuable companies to yours would just about match Shopify's current market cap. . . . Now suppose your company was worth only 2 million USD. Then you'd need 99,999 friends with […]

i wrote about atproto and why it matters

What the F/OSS world needs in order to be healthy is a large number of independent developers and small business owners collaborating together out of shared interest. That has cratered in the Ruby world in the last several years, and I believe that's a root cause of our failed governance. This […]

Scale and growth are not the same thing. To scale something means to do more of it. Possibly Cheaper. Possibly Better. Possibly Faster. But also quite possibly, the opposite of all that. To grow something is to consider its place within an ecosystem, and to make sure the surrounding conditions […]

Ruby Central must either definitively prove this wrong or my best advice would be for people to slowly divest from Ruby entirely if you're not ok with being dependent upon a single corporation's authoritarian whims. https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ (Joel claims to have anonymous […]

It should not be controversial to wonder when a non-profit organization responsible for stewardship of an entire open source ecosystem takes sudden and opaque option and admits it was at the behest of a sponsor who demanded they take that action by a certain date... 1) Who is that sponsor? 2) […]

So the way I read this is a sponsor forced this action by Ruby Central. If that sponsor was Shopify, then in effect, this confirms that a company that DHH is a board member of forced this action. If not, who was responsible for this then? This is a very […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

This is crying out for Tim Berners-Lee’s pods idea; ie storing your post data (and other stuff) in a pod that you own and control, so that you can import it into a new instance. Has this been looked into as an option for Mastodon? https://digipres.club/@misty/115232297552394081

Ruby Central should be dissolved and a new organization should replace it that has sound governance policies suitable for free and open source software ecosystems. There's no coming back from the multiple successive bad faith acts they have taken under the current leadership.

Elixir/Phoenix devs: how's it going? I haven't touched Elixir for years so I'm OOTL but looking to revisit. Things good?

If you’re not prototyping already, trust us, it’s game changing, but here’s Jim to convince you further. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/idea-to-reality-with-prototypes/

This is why I believe we're going to need better tools for reading and exploring codebases "Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even easier […]

Going to start doing some stream of consciousness essay writing on things that have been on my mind. They'll eventually connect with software development / systems thinking ideas, but increasingly it's hard to start there and not have it seem artificial or inauthentic. Here's the first one […]

It is impossible to overcome dependency hell without a corresponding reduction in complexity. (Which may be incidental or essential, but one way or another... must be reduced if you want more freedom for the people using a system than less)

Troubleshooting vs Debugging... Just looking for personal gut reactions. Are they the same thing, or are there meaningful differences between them? (If they're different, what makes them so?)

The ability to copy and paste is probably the most powerful software UX design pattern humans have ever come up with. I have said this a bunch of times in various tech circles and people always assume I'm joking or being facetious, but I mean it. What's more powerful than to take something you […]

My unkind take is that startups should refrain from posting thought leadership on any sort of business success subject because respectfully you havenae actually built a successful business yet, you've raised money... If we had a higher standard of economic knowhow this shit would raise more […]

For pete's sake, @mozilla : if you want to measure whether the AI/ML features are worth a damn, put a big green "disable all AI in my browser" button on the version update screen and put some telemetry around how many people instantly click it. Just about everyone I know who has taken the 142 […]

It's sort of incredible to me that rather than building better rapid prototyping tools, the tech world opted for vibe coding via LLMs instead. Not surprising, given the inherent bias towards excess complexity. But whoever builds a first class prototyping tool that gives people an experience of […]

Let’s face it, social media is becoming increasingly difficult to find things amongst the noise. RSS is better than ever now though and this guide will get you running nicely. https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/

One of the joys of getting into systems thinking is that it helps you "see" flows rather than just paying attention to stocks. Stock-centric view: "There's always a hundred boxes piled up here" Flow-centric view: "A thousand boxes per day move through this space" Both are necessary for […]

"I don’t write these posts for VC-funded LLMs to come along and gobble up and produce some shitty facsimile, or summarise what I’m saying with none of the nuance or context on someone else’s website." Same. https://localghost.dev/blog/this-website-is-for-humans/

Thinking of moving on from GitHub - I already have a GitLab and Codeberg presence. But I find both of them dissatisfying for two reasons. 1. I can't host in my own domain. I don't want to run/maintain a git instance. But I'd like to use git.edent.tel - so I can keep the URL but swap provider […]