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 "ruby"
Building ActiveCypher: When Ruby Learns to Speak Graph
How building a Cypher DSL taught me more about framework design, why supporting legacy is a trap.
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.
CrystalMeet
CrystalMeet turned Ruby into Crystal with a pile of regular expressions. It half worked, and the other half lives in Ruby's runtime, where no regex can reach. /r/rails deleted it in 2024. Its scenarios are landing in spinel now.
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.
LLMs and the Ossification of APIs: Are We Stuck with Prehistoric Patterns?
How AI coding assistants are influencing API design in Ruby, and whether we're reinforcing old patterns or creating new opportunities.
Macroaggression
I abused the C preprocessor until C read like Ruby. At -O2 the assembly shows it changes little beyond the spelling of a loop. Steve Bourne did the same to C in the 1970s, and his version inspired the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
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.
Operation: From State Hero to Zero
The surgical breakdown of a 1.6k LOC Ruby monolith into focused modules. Or: how I performed open-heart surgery on a dying codebase and lived to tell the tale.
Parasites With a Term Sheet
Since 2023, companies keep trying to buy the gems I publish, or to hire me under a contract that hands them all of it. I scambaited five of them to the end. The plan never changes: raise $10-20M, then buy someone else's decade of downloads for a few thousand.
The Puppet Master: How Shopify Orchestrated Ruby Central's Hostile Takeover
The smoking gun revealed - Shopify threatened to pull funding unless Ruby Central seized control of RubyGems. hsbt was the insider who enabled it. The rv project was seen as a threat. This is the full story of corporate capture.
The Q&A Aftermath: A Board Member Confesses, A Maintainer Rebuts
Hours after Ruby Central's Q&A, board member Freedom Dumlao broke ranks to explain his vote. Martin Emde's devastating response exposes the lies Ruby Central told their own board.
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.
The RubyGems Coup: When Parasites Take the Host
Ruby Central forcibly removed the people who built RubyGems for over a decade, replacing them with a 'Director of Open Source' whose last Ruby code was a conference tutorial in 2010. This is the anatomy of a hostile takeover disguised as 'strengthening stewardship.'
The Security That Wasn't: Ruby Central's Theater Exposed
Joel Drapper's technical investigation reveals the smoking gun - Ruby Central's "security measures" left Andre with full production access while removing his GitHub permissions. David Rodriguez loses gem ownership with only 1 of 8 owners consenting. This wasn't security. It was theater with screenshots to prove it.
Software Is Not a Nursing Home: Breaking Free from Legacy Support
Legacy support isn't just technical debt—it's innovation debt. Here's why I finally bumped my Ruby gem to require version 3.2.0 and why you should stop dragging corpses through your codebase.
The Republic of Slop
A country where no citizen has ever felt a constraint. The dev box has 128GB, the model never says "this is too much," and the cloud bills instead of refusing. Then it ships to a 2GB server. On languages as materials, and the 100x receipt that proves nobody measured anything.
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 Ruby Developer's Guide to Warp Speed: Why I Learned Go
After years of comfortable cruising through the Ruby nebula, I discovered something that changed everything. This is the story of why a die-hard Rubyist decided to learn Go—and what I found on the other side.
Arming the State Guards: Captain Seuros vs. The 9-Year GitHub Issue
How a Moroccan captain finally implemented the most requested state_machines feature after 9 years of maintainer paralysis. Featuring the RMNS Atlas Monkey and emergency warp protocols.
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.
The Quantum State Rebellion: Why Enums Are Not State Machines
When half the mining fleet switched to using simple Rails enums for state management, chaos ensued. Ships transitioned from operational to vacuum exposure without validation, weapons fired randomly, and life support systems failed catastrophically. This is the story of how Captain Seuros proved that enums are not state machines, and why the state_machines gem saved the fleet from disaster.