The Observability Trap: Why I Built Lapsoss to Break Vendor Chains
How the observability industry's vendor lock-in tactics led to building Lapsoss and the Liberation Stack - community-owned tools that put developers back in control
Posts tagged "rails"
Breaking Chains: Why I Dropped Rails 7.1 Support in state_machines-activerecord 0.40.0
After 12 years maintaining state_machines, I dropped Rails 7.1 support. This is the story of why forever backward compatibility kills innovation and how I'm building for the future, not maintaining the past.
Finding the Road Back Home: Building a Clean PostGIS Gem for Rails 8
How I escaped the zoo of monkey patches and built a clean, Rails 8-friendly PostGIS adapter gem that actually works with modern Rails.
Matz Told Me Why
In one week, matz closed my pull request to spinel and the /r/rails moderators banned me for good. Matz explained his decision in five sentences. In two years of removing my posts, the moderators never explained one.
My JRuby Saga: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and (Almost) Accept the JVM
How working with JRuby 10 and Rails 8 changed my perspective on the JVM, one reluctant commit at a time.
NoFlyList: Choosing Between Polymorphic and Model-Specific Tags
Learn when to use polymorphic vs model-specific tags by building a blog platform. Understand the trade-offs and performance implications.
NoFlyList: Custom Tag Screening with NoFlyList
Tag parsing seems simple until you handle real user input. Explore how NoFlyList's custom screening prevents malicious and spam tags.
NoFlyList : How NoFlyList Got Cleared for Production
From technical debt in Acts-as-Taggable-On to production-ready NoFlyList: a journey of building cleaner, faster tagging for Rails apps.
NoFlyList: How NoFlyList Optimizes Tag Queries
NoFlyList automatically detects your database type and uses specific optimization strategies to make tag queries blazingly fast.
Pencils Down Since 1954
In 1954 IBM promised FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. In 2026 37signals went pencils down. Both were right about the typing. The quarter of the dollar that was always the job is still sitting there.
The Q&A Aftermath: Ruby Central's Governance Crisis Deepens
Ruby Central's Q&A happened, but the real story emerged from a board member's confession and a maintainer's devastating rebuttal revealing the full scope of the governance breakdown.
The Raw, Frustrating Journey Behind Rails Lens: A Decade of Code Rage, AI Sparks, and Finally Breaking Free
The unfiltered story of Rails Lens: ten years of frustration, harassment, theft, and finally breaking free to build something better. From TOML discoveries to AI validation, this is how persistence beats pattern parasites.
Rails Version Management with Rails AppVersion
Rails AppVersion provides a standard way to handle version and environment information in Rails apps with best practices for deployment.
The Rust Revolution Proposal Had a 363-Day Fuse
In September 2025 I wrote a satirical proposal to rewrite Rails in Rust, and picked Rust because it was the one language David would never touch. On September 23, 2026 he told Rails World he hates Rust with a passion and is rebuilding HEY's backend in it. The satire got one line wrong, and it stopped one language too early.
The Soviets* Landed First
In For All Mankind, the Soviets reach the Moon first and NASA keeps the cameras. Noiseless started in 2021 because the official Elasticsearch gem refuses to talk to OpenSearch. Basecamp shipped its Active Search in 2026.
Turkey Belongs to Two Worlds
closure_tree said no to multiple parents for fourteen years. dag_me is the yes: DAGs for ActiveRecord, with cycles rejected inside PostgreSQL.
When 'Simple Refactoring' Isn't Simple: A Pattern Recognition Exercise (Part 1)
I spend time in scammer communities studying grift patterns. When I saw RubyCademy's "simple refactoring" advice, something clicked. This isn't about one bad tweet - it's about recognizing the laboratory system that turns confused developers into revenue streams.
The Environmental Deception Protocol: When Your Rails App Doesn't Know Where It Lives
Atlas Monkey crew discovers that Rails.env has been deceiving developers since 2004. When mining colonies report phantom deployment bugs across multiple "production" environments, ARIA uncovers how 847+ gems create behavioral chaos because they can't distinguish between staging, sandbox, and actual production. Captain Seuros deploys the rails_app_version Environmental Truth Protocol to end the deception.
The Quantum Infiltrator Protocol: Captain Cyrel's Graph Database Gambit
When a quantum shapeshifter infiltrates the Federation's antimatter supply chain, Captain Cyrel of the USS ActiveCypher must use graph database technology to track an enemy that exists in relationships, not rows. A thrilling tale of how ActiveCypher brings Rails conventions to the graph database revolution.