flats

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Max/MSP, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs.

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: [email protected]

https://robador.com/daf

Comment · 5 months ago

Yes, typing would obviate the need for the sorts of extensive unit testing I'm talking about here. I feel that. Luckily, the frontier LLMs (especially Claude) have gotten _really_ good at writing Rspec...

Comment · 5 months ago

Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.

Comment · 5 months ago

There are indeed so many compelling arguments against using Ruby these days (e.g. performance, type safety, an increasingly small user base), & yet I continue to reach for it because of this effortless expressiveness (& the maturity of the ecosystem).

Comment · 6 months ago

Senior Software Engineer

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.

Willing to relocate: probably not.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: [email protected]

https://robador.com/daf

Comment · 6 months ago

I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.

It still blows my mind that this is the same company.

Comment · 6 months ago

I absolutely agree with you.

Also, some folks seem to be forgetting the virtues of boring, time-tested platforms & technologies in their rush to embrace the new & shiny & vibe-***ed. & also forgetting to thoroughly read documentation. It’s not terribly surprising to me that an “AI-first” infrastructure company might make these sorts of questionable design decisions.

Comment · 6 months ago

One does not even need OpenClaw to achieve this outcome: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

Comment · 6 months ago

Absolutely yes, all over the place! Startups are building greenfield software with Rails as we speak. Loads of established businesses have Ruby applications that are quietly chugging along doing their jobs well. & Shopify, a company with $1.6 billion in annual revenue, uses Ruby _very_ heavily & also invests in the wider Ruby ecosystem.

Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it’s elegant in a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately) unexciting in the best way.

Comment · 6 months ago

That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!

Comment · 6 months ago

I was very skeptical of these plans at first—as a New Yorker, I don’t exactly have a lot of trust in our city’s government to run things well.

But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.