Joshua Wood

Microblog

“Reck is lightweight compared to other Ruby web frameworks such as Rails and Sinatra. We handle only the routing and middleware layers using Ruby’s built-in exception system to raise requests to the client. Flow control in Ruby has never been easier.”

rack is to reck as snake is to snek

Who wants to join my secret Honeybadger Discord?

Things we could chat about there:

  • DevOps, monitoring, observability
  • Indie SaaS and marketing
  • Junior devs/early career
  • General goofing off

Send me an email if you’d like to join (josh at honeybadger.io).

To be honest, “DHH switches to Linux and discovers ricing” was not on my 2024 bingo card.

I just landed in PDX and found three new #RubyFriends

Four men sitting around a wooden table in a cozy setting, with festive lights and award ribbons hanging on the wall behind them. The man in the foreground is taking a selfie, while the others smile and look towards the camera.

I really enjoyed all of the talks at Blue Ridge Ruby. It’s so much work to create a good presentation—thanks to all of the speakers! Here are some moments from day two (Friday).

Travis Turner of Evil Martians presents a slide at Blue Ridge Ruby conference featuring an image of a lively classroom discussion, engaging with the audience while pointing to the projected content. Louis Antonopoulos presents at Blue Ridge Ruby conference on “Glimpses of Humanity: My Game-Building AI Pair,” wearing a shirt with a Van Gogh-inspired design, addressing an audience with a slide displayed behind him. Rachael Wright-Munn presents on “Validate Me! Demystifying Rails Validators” at Blue Ridge Ruby conference, gesturing expressively while addressing the audience, with the presentation title displayed on the screen behind her. Dustin Haefele-Tschanz presents “The Pursuit of Happiness: Applying Studies in Positive Psychology to Optimize Well-being” at Blue Ridge Ruby conference, engaging the audience with a slide displayed behind him, featuring his contact information and professional title. Confreaks Owner/CEO Cindy Backman presents a lightening talk at Blue Ridge Ruby conference. Jeremy Smith praises the work of Andy Croll and others at Blue Ridge Ruby conference, with a photo of Andy and a webpage screenshot projected behind him.

Great first morning of talks at Blue Ridge Ruby! Local single-track Ruby conferences are magical, let’s do more of them. ✨

Two speakers addressing a large audience at the Blue Ridge Ruby conference, with sponsor banners including AppSignal and Honeybadger visible behind them, in a room filled with seated attendees listening attentively. Speaker at a technology conference presenting a slide titled “I expect a reliable website. BugHub has been having a lot of problems lately.” with a cartoon bug image, in front of an audience of attentive attendees. Presenter at a conference discussing a case study related to Rails and AWS, indicated by icons on a slide that reads “~ 6 months”, standing beside a podium with a Blue Ridge Ruby conference banner. Speaker engaging with the audience during a presentation titled “Nothing Is Easy, Is It? A Talk About Nothing (Nil)” at the Blue Ridge Ruby conference, with several attendees raising their hands in response.

Have we considered that Mulder and Scully are actually not good special agents and that’s why they’re in a made-up department that the brass created to fuck with them?

It’s not perfect, but Bluesky is my favorite social network by far. What is it about Bluesky?

Got my first development environment (Jekyll website) running in NixOS on my Framework laptop using devenv. That makes this my first successful dev environment in nix. :) Nice work, Domen!

Remember when Twitter and Reddit had entire developer ecosystems built around their open APIs? Those were the days.

I tried something new with my last short blog post about writing. I recorded a narrated version of it. In addition to writing more, I’d like to be more practiced and comfortable speaking into a microphone.

Thank you for RailsConf

This year, Ruby Central announced that 2025 will be the last RailsConf. While I’m sad to lose a favorite Ruby conference, it’s for the best. The Ruby Central team will be able to focus on their core mission: supporting the Ruby language.

There is so much work to do and so much opportunity to improve Ruby’s community and ecosystem. I’m excited to see what Ruby Central will do with their renewed focus, but they must be well-funded to succeed. If you love Ruby, consider becoming a monthly sustaining member—and ask your employer to do the same:

https://rubycentral.org/support/

One last thing—It’s too easy to create caricatures of each other, to assume the worst, to forget about the people behind the avatars. Let’s come together to build the best language, frameworks, and community that we can.

Thank you, Ruby Central, for so many wonderful years of RailsConf!

As a former freelancer, I wonder what non-developer founders think about AI coding agents. Twelve years ago, many of the Rails rescue projects I worked on resulted from poorly maintained codebases that the client had hacked on themselves in some cases.

Will the new “rescue project” be code that has had Copilot Workspace PRs uncritically merged by various actors over the years?