Archives

Why 'boring' tools like Stimulus.js are a superpower for mature Rails applications.

A case study on migrating from ActiveModel::Serializers to Alba, including real-world benchmarks and a custom caching solution.

Why I built AyatFlow as an 'Anti-Canvas' to prioritize the dignity of sacred text over infinite design flexibility.

A modern solution to bring back email obfuscation in Rails using Stimulus, ensuring zero spam and a great user experience.

How to use Rails as the 'Brain' and Go as the 'Photographer' to generate high-performance screenshots, keeping the Rails app lightweight and responsive.

A distillation of the most practical and impactful ideas from John Ousterhout's book 'A Philosophy of Software Design', focused on reducing complexity in software.

Dive into a real-world debugging scenario involving missing HTTP headers during a Rails 5 upgrade, exploring the root causes and how to resolve them.

My experience migrating my personal blog from Gridsome to Astro, including the challenges, benefits, and lessons learned along the way.

Exploring emerging performance metrics and optimization strategies that will shape the next generation of web applications.

Strategies and resources for developers to stay current with rapidly evolving technologies and maintain career growth in the tech industry.

Learn how to format ActiveSupport::Duration objects into concise, human-readable strings with locale support using the duration_in_words gem.

WeakMaps allow objects to be used as keys, offering memory efficiency and encapsulation—ideal for private data storage and avoiding memory leaks.

In Ruby, modules can provide both namespacing and mixin functionality. Learn how to define module-level functions using module_function and extend self, and the differences between them.

Ruby supports file-level 'magic comments' that instruct the interpreter—most famously for source encoding, but also for freezing strings, shareable constants, and indentation warnings.

Learn how to safely extract external HTTP headers in Rails while filtering out internal Rack and Rails environment variables.

How to remove an updated file from a pull request without deleting the file itself — ensuring your changeset stays clean and focused.

Learn how to manage multiple SSH keys for personal, work, and client projects using ssh-agent, ssh config, and gitconfig conditionals.

Learn how to create and use Python virtual environments with venv to isolate dependencies and manage multiple projects cleanly.

Upgrading macOS often breaks command-line setups. Here’s how I fixed issues with Homebrew, Zsh, and oh-my-zsh during the Big Sur upgrade—steps still useful for modern macOS versions.

When an NPM package is missing a feature or has a blocking bug, point your project at a maintained fork via a Git URL—plus modern alternatives like patch-package and overrides.

Explore different ways to keep arrays unique in Ruby—using `uniq`, `uniq!`, and the `|` operator.

Learn how to set and randomize full-page background images in a Rails app using CSS3 and simple view helpers.

A practical introduction to singly and doubly linked lists—what they are, when to use them, core operations, time/space trade-offs, and modern relevance.

Learn the basics of working with files in Ruby: opening, reading, writing, streaming, and querying file objects efficiently.

Learn different ways to fetch a random row in ActiveRecord, their trade-offs in PostgreSQL and MySQL, and which method to prefer for performance.

Forgetting a database password isn’t the end of the world. Here’s how to reset or recover the MySQL root password, with notes for modern MySQL versions.

A look back at techniques for highlighting the active link in Rails navigation, with modern alternatives using current_page? and Stimulus.

Learn a classic CSS trick to center a fixed-width or fixed-height element using absolute positioning and negative margins.

Learn how to reset and reinitialize table sequences in PostgreSQL safely, whether preserving existing data or starting fresh.

A look back at how Rails 2.x apps loaded CSV data into models, and how modern Rails apps can do it more efficiently today.

Learn how to add a simple close button to dismiss Rails flash messages and a modern Rails 7+ Stimulus approach.

Learn how to connect a Rails app to multiple databases using establish_connection, with context on modern Rails features for handling multi-DB setups.