bradgessler

hahaha.... oops, I had to send that to Comcast because they're now thinking if I restart my modem for the third time, it will fix the problem.

I have a Ruby hackers starter pack at https://bsky.app/starter-pack/bradgessler.com/3laa47lbuwb2r

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Edit: replaced cable modem link with starter pack link

Perhaps, but I haven’t seen this level of momentum and consensus behind a text-based social network since early Twitter.

Time will tell—ultimately it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people “believe” and sign up, it will happen.

Two reasons to like BlueSky:

1. Your username can be your website. I'm @bradgessler.com.

2. Copy and pasting images into a message works on iOS (this has been broken on X/Twitter for a long time).

There's more reasons to like it, but these two feel pretty great.

I put a Ruby hacker starter pack together if you're looking for a way in:

https://go.bsky.app/HXB2cPh

There's tons of other ones and communities as well.

Problem with Mastodon is you’re forced to associate with the identity of the sever or run your own instance, both of which are very awkward.

I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev.

I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse.

Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about.

For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com”

Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.

The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I'm @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to "verify" me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website.

If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident".

I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u

I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there.

I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.

A few things I like about BlueSky:

1. Your username can be your domain name. I’m @bradgessler.com, which means I can build more “equity” in my domain than I can on other platforms. It’s also really great for brands or open source projects that have their own website.

2. Lots of technical folks have come over from Twitter and the signal to noise ratio is much better. There’s less weird random videos, less people screaming past each other, less porn bots.

3. When I share a link on Bluesky, it doesn’t get penalized.

4. It’s a global namespace so I don’t have to worry about what server people are on that I want to follow. I struggled with this on Mastodon.

5. The UI is as good as Twitter. There’s been a few times now where I forget what network I’m using by just looking at the app.

6. Starter packs are handy to bring folks from your communities over. I created one for Ruby devs at https://go.bsky.app/HXB2cPh and one for companies built on Ruby at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u

I fully expect Bluesky to become completely enshitified over time, but I think it’s going to have a pretty good run for a while. They’re doing a lot of things right and it has fun early Twitter vibes, but without the fail whale.

> This is exacerbated by ruby's tendencies towards "fluent" interfaces, which is actually code for lots of methods that take undocumented hashes of arguments --- and hash access with strings and symbols? nightmare fuel.

Keyword arguments and pattern matching have improved this quite a bit, but not everybody is using it yet. I'm not sure how much Rails is using it either, which doesn't help.

It's def a dicey situation, but improving.

In the last few weeks I’ve noticed there’s been an influx of engineers moving from X/Twitter to BlueSky. If you’re looking for early Twitter vibes, https://bsky.app is where it’s at.

In practice DaisyUI makes it easy for people who use Tailwind to quickly build prototype UIs. Later they can go back and replace the DaisyUI classes with Tailwind.

In less words, if you can’t stand Tailwind then DaisyUI is not for you.

I switched all my Bulma sites to https://daisyui.com/ since it works with Tailwind.

You can get it in the public betas, but it’s very underwhelming and not useful. I’m surprised they’re talking this up so much to be honest.

If you are a Ruby or Rails dev, I built https://sitepress.cc/ to run stand-alone, embedded in Rails, or as a static site compiler.

It’s MIT licensed so anybody can use it, including people affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.

I've heard from lots of folks in the Rails community that getting http/2 and streaming into Rails has been a slow and tedious process. I'm not saying it's going to be "a good fit for everything"—what I am saying is that it will be nice when we can run IO bound workloads in Rails without feeling like a fish out of water.

"it's certainly not a good fit for the overwhelming majority of Rails applications".

In my experience, most web applications are terminating HTTP connections from clients, then reaching out over a network to database servers, etc. to do work. This is very much IO-bound, so I'm not sure how this wouldn't be a good fit for most Rails applications.

There's various PRs where Fiber adapters are making their way into the Rails stack. Rails 8 added a ton of support for Fibers, with the exception of ActionCable. There's a PR open for that, which I assume will land sometime soon.

Rails has been really slow to pick-up async/http-2. They don't know it yet, but Falcon and all async libraries Samuel is working on will probably be a huge them 1-2 years out when more people find out it means less infra has to be deployed to production environments. Right now folks are happy to deploy without Redis™ with the Solid stack, but a lot of that won't be needed if proper async support is baked into Rails.

There's been a lot of Fiber features being committed into the Ruby language that I barely understand, but have improved all of these async libraries over the past few years. That's finally starting to bear some fruit for people like myself who don't really understand all of those details, but understand the benefits.

It will happen, but these things tend to play out more slowly in Ruby, which is a feature or a bug depending on how you look at it.

I'm optimistic about Ruby's async story with the work Samuel Williams has been doing. https://github.com/socketry/falcon is the tip of the iceberg, which is built on top of https://github.com/socketry/protocol-http2 and a not of other repos at https://github.com/socketry.

It's inspiring other's in the community to think of interesting applications, like using the HTML slot API to stream responses to HTML without JS. https://x.com/joeldrapper/status/1841984952407110037

I know other frameworks have had asynchronous IO support forever, but it's finally coming to Ruby that seems like it will stick around and be well supported.

Agreed, seems very very small for 5000lb of explosives. Guessing it didn't reach its full yield given that its been buried under ground for decades.

Curious how you distribute a Ruby project so widely on so many machines. What are the biggest challenges? What pointers would you give to others who want to distribute installed Ruby software to lots of different platforms?

What aggravates me about YouTube is there's some great content that would be amazing for kids, but it's mixed with lots of garbage. Since YouTube doesn't provide any reasonable way for people to curate and share these allow lists with others, I end up completely blocking it on various devices, resulting in less hours of viewership for YouTube.

Tesla bills themselves as an energy company. In theory, they could back their charging network with solar and battery storage and offer power cheaper/cleaner than competitors.

I’ve had issues using the Resolv library in Ruby when I’m connecting to the internet via a tethered iPhone. Never ran into that until Sequoia. I wonder if that’s related?

TBH I’m too lazy to dig in and find out. Has anybody else run into this issue?

I’ve been working on https://terminalwire.com to scratch my own itch making it easier to add command-line interfaces into my own web apps.

If I pull this off, building out a CLI that’s as high quality as GitHub & Stripe’s should be trivial since it won’t require building out a web API and it can be dropped into existing web frameworks.

It won’t be as fast as a CLI that runs locally, but that’s kinda not the point of terminal apps that primarily interact with web services.

I have a private beta for folks working on commercial SaaS products that want to deploy a CLI, but don’t want to deal with building out an API.

My favorite thing about BlueSky is I can be my domain: @bradgessler.com.

Has IO through the hypervisor improved on macOS? Last I tried, the `./node_modules` directory absolutely destroyed the ability for me to use Docker as a development environment on my macOS workstations for Rails development, even with the special caching flags enabled.

A lot has change since then, like I stay away from node and `./node_modules` as much as possible via importmaps, but even then the FS performance wasn't enough for my needs.

I think eliminating nuclear weapons is out of the question. We see that over and over again when nations that don't have nuclear weapons get dominated by nuclear nation-states, which sends a clear message to non-nuclear countries that they should develop nuclear weapons if they care about their sovereignty.

The next best thing is to try to slow down how fast the destruction unfolds.

There was actually an incident where NORAD's terminals lit up with a full scale nuclear attack from Russia. They only had a few minutes to determine whether or not to launch a counter-attack. During that time they found out somebody left a training tape on the "production system" and fortunately it ended there. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

The world got lucky on that day. In my mind this incident is the same as the "configuration management errors" we see take down huge websites. It's just a matter of time.

My proposal would look something like at traditional arms treaty with limits to the size and number of warheads, but I'd also add to that a time dimension. Maybe we agree to allow 10's of weapons that can be deployed in minutes, then there's another tranche of 100's of weapons that take more time to prepare... perhaps it takes hours to deploy them, or days. This would give people more time to determine if the threat is real and possibly let cooler heads prevail.

I have no idea how that would be enforced and how nations would prevent other nations from having a secret stash of deployed nuclear weapons.

This increases the likelihood of accidents and misinterpretations triggering a nuclear war, which is inevitable as long as these weapons exist.

The first bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 and the world has successfully avoided incidents, accidents, etc. from spiraling out of control into a full-scale exchange for 79 years. Will this continue for 10 more months? 10 more years? 100 years or longer? Nobody knows, but the thing we do know is that there's a non-zero chance of the worst happening.

There's a book about incidents worth reading called "Command and Control": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) that's worth reading if you want to better understand the risks we're dealing with by having nuclear weapons.

On brand for "do things that don't scale"

How do you get it to work so well? I’ve tried it a few times now and it seems just as capable as gpt-4o.

The results of this study have always bothered me.

I don’t like marshmallows. Never have. If I was run through the marshmallow test I would have done whatever it takes to get out of there quickly and not have to eat marshmallows.

Has anybody successfully created a software collective?

I think my ideal world would be building applications in Ruby with other late-career folks who are low drama, interested in making money, love talking to customers, and don’t get distracted by shiny new tech that becomes stupid tech debt a few months later.

Cultured Code comes to mind, though I don’t know if they’re a collective.