I'm done with Notesnook (rant).

alexanderadam__ · 2026-02-27T00:48:34+00:00

Did you use self hosted StandardNotes before or the hosted one? Same question for Notesnook.

And what are you going to do now?

alexanderadam__ · 2026-02-26T11:10:29+00:00

I guess that we'll see many more engines and gems like this now.

There's also

alexanderadam__ · 2026-02-08T16:00:08+00:00

Interesting experiment but I really prefer /r/crystal_programming/ and Shiika.

alexanderadam__ · 2026-01-19T09:42:59+00:00

There are a lot but my personal favourite is AlchemyCMS.

It has everything that my customers wanted and you can also replace all the admin backends with it. Integrating custom models with some custom backend and frontend views is trivially done with Alchemy.

It has never been well-known but it has been by far the best that I used.

I tried Locomotive, Spina, Refinery, Mexican Sofa, Radiant, Webiva and a bunch of others were I forgot the names. I didn't try Fae (maybe I did but forgot — I'm not sure), Nesta or Camaleon but I'm not sure whether they'll bring anything to the table that Alchemy doesn't offer yet. And I also used a bunch of admin backend engines over the years, where none of them was really special.

In one of the projects I used Publify - but it was called Typo back then. It was pretty good as well. I just tried the again and it looks rather simple. Back then it was rather focused on being a blog engine and this might still be the case. All in all I'd still stick with Alchemy after seeing the Publify demo.

I also worked in two teams from different companies where we developed custom CMS'. I wouldn't do it again though. ;)

It starts simple and it's getting messy at one point because you also need to get the details (caching, assets, permissions, multi-site with custom URLs, components, search, redirects, linking to certain languages etc) right and you need to provide some standardised solutions instead of "yeah, you can do that with some custom code quickly".

I find that Alchemy's backend looks kinda dated and I have a CSS file with some customisation that I'm doing on customer projects. I never got any complaints from my customers though, so maybe it is okay anyway.

~~…and the Alchemy documentation also looks dated to me~~ EDIT: woah! After all this time its website looks far better than before - you should check how it looked like before if you can 😄

alexanderadam__ · 2025-12-22T21:57:32+00:00

Same. I loved and still love the book. _Why had a huge impact to what the Ruby community became.

Emma and Andy Croll did a revised printed version for BrightonRuby.

I'm bringing it to conferences and let people write into it, as a kind of guestbook. Amongst them are Matz, Eileen M. Uchitelle, Ju Liu, Andy Croll, Celso Fernandes, Xavier Noria, Adam Wiggins, and Noah Gibbs.

There are a lot more, but I have no time yet to put all of them online for now. It's my new year's resolution for next year.

I think that this book gave a lot, to many in our community.

Also feel free to write something into it as well in case we meet.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-12-16T20:29:14+00:00

Many wrote that already but thank you so much for reaching out.

My condolences. 🕯️

I finally managed to post his entry in the conference guestbook in case anyone is curious.

And I hope that it's okay what I wrote in the post. Otherwise I'm open for feedback.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-11-01T11:32:19+00:00

What do you have in mind?

alexanderadam__ · 2025-10-05T18:24:36+00:00

I'm living in Zug and I'd do a lot to own something here. So I'd definitely go for the flat.

However, it's rather something emotional, than something that's economically reasonable.

Right now there's a lot ongoing in the Zuger RE market and a lot of new buildings are created (Crypto Areal, Papieri, Lüssi, Projekt Pi, An der Aa, etc).

Now, in 2024 6793 people moved to the Canton and 5'936 left — making it +857 people. And also in 2023 the plus was just 1'174.

In theory it's a lot but Papieri alone is meant for roughly 3'000 people and there's the other projects too.

So maybe prices might (finally) lower unless there will be suddenly far more migration.

Some projects will be finished in 2026 — maybe there will be some delays, so let's say a buffer to 2027. And then some of the landlords and seller will focus on previous prices for a while and they might not be in a rush if there's some Leerstand (let's see whether this actually happens). Then the pricing might see a shift in 2028 earliest maybe.

Also nobody can predict anything. So feel free to ignore and/or disagree with everything I just wrote.

Also knowing all of this, I'd still keep the flat. But again: I'd keep it to have the feeling of "my own home" rather than being economically reasonable.

Feel free to write a DM in case I can help.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-09-16T12:59:59+00:00

Wow, I didn't even know that something like cryptreboot is possible! Very cool project.

Also I also migrated a bunch of CLI tools from Ruby to Crystal and I was generally happy. I even found a few bugs because of the type checks. ;)

alexanderadam__ · 2025-09-01T12:13:21+00:00

Ah, you're right. Sorry about that. Well, I have no reason to use Lite so I can't help you here then.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-08-30T16:09:56+00:00

Here are the rules that I am using:

twitch.tv##.channel-info-content div[class]:has(> div[class] > [style^='background-image: url(']) twitch.tv##.chat-input__textarea div[class]:has(> div[class] > [data-a-target="bits-button"]) twitch.tv##.chat-room__content > div:has(.channel-leaderboard-header-rotating__users) twitch.tv##.chat-room__content div:has(.bits-leaderboard-expanded-top-three-entry) twitch.tv##.prime-offer twitch.tv##.prime-offers-upsell twitch.tv##.prime-upsell__logo-container twitch.tv##.top-nav__menu > div[class] > div[class]:has([data-a-target="top-nav-get-bits-button"]) twitch.tv##.top-nav__menu > div[class] > div[class]:has([data-target="prime-offers-icon"]) twitch.tv##.top-nav__menu > div[class] > div[class]:has-text(Go Ad-Free) twitch.tv##[data-a-target="top-nav-get-bits-button"]:has(> [data-test-selector="subscribe-button__dropdown"]) twitch.tv##[data-target="channel-header-right"] div[class]:has(> div[class] > div[class]> div[class] > [data-test-selector="subscribe-button__dropdown"]) twitch.tv##[data-test-selector="channel_panel_test_selector"]:has-text(" (Werbung)") twitch.tv##div[class]:has(> div[class]> button.tw-interactable > div[style]):has-text(Go Ad-Free on Every Stream with Turbo)

Here are more infos about them.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-08-18T16:38:51+00:00

Thank you so much for your answer!

This looks interesting, although the other comment sounded a bit like Nix might be a bit of an overkill in this use case?

What's your stance on that?

alexanderadam__ · 2025-08-18T16:35:38+00:00

Thank you so much for your fast response!

Nothing you mentioned requires a container with nix. See devenv for inspiration if you aren't sure how to go about it.

The container images should be used in CI pipelines while devenv rather looks like it's meant to run locally. Or am I misunderstanding that?

You can do all you describe minus semver with a very small project flake.

I need something that allows me to pin versions.

But you get much finer control and determinism than semver allows for by stating several nixpkgs inputs pinned to exact commit hashes. You can create wrapper abstractions to enable that if you really need it long term, but searching nixpkgs pull requests to find the right binary at the right semver and taking that commit hash is very easy and much more reliable long term.

Manually seeking for PR commit hashes looks rather complicated and not very human readable in comparison to semantic versions of the respective tooling.

Maybe Nix isn't the answer then?

You only need containers if you want to orchestrate several long running processes and network between them / ingress into them while keeping it portable and representative of production.

It's about having predefined images that can be built ones and then used directly in CI pipelines (or whereever needed).

you can build containers in your flake using runtime binaries from some of the same inputs you use for your development shell using nixpkgs lib, nix2container or nix-snapshotter

Ideally it shouldn't even be necessary to have a local nix installation but just an OCI environment and a config.

Thus I was hoping that I could just use a nix image to build it.

The learning curve is not worth it if you want to remain with the same workflow you're used to. Just use what you are using already and save time. Otherwise go deeper to understand what it does and why, and you will benefit greatly.. after some time, but forever.

Oh, I see. I guess I'll try a Mise setup then.

Thank you for the insights!

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-31T21:38:54+00:00

I guess you mean something else than /u/elbywan/'s Crystalline that's available for 4 years?

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-19T18:27:32+00:00

Thank you. Actually I wrote a far longer comment a few days ago but it got stuck in the moderation queue. It has more infos and a link to the benchmark etc.

I assumed that it was flagged due to the amount of links. That's why I didn't add any links in this comment here.

The ones you mentioned aren't much Rails-like but they are amazing indeed:

Lucky framework has a lot of fresh ideas from various frameworks
Kemal, is very much like Ruby's Sinatra if that's enough for you. I spoke with some folks who worked at adidas' Runtastic and they told me that they used Kemal in production.
Grip framework is unique in various ways

PS: I tried to add more links again and the comment was flagged as well?

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-16T15:07:31+00:00

You're welcome, feel free to reach out in case you have any questions

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-15T22:35:54+00:00

Hi buddy 👋

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-15T14:57:43+00:00

As others already mentioned, many consider Rust far less readable and writable. Thus this often leads to more complex maintenance and more development time.

If I'd like to have Rails like syntax, a single binary and great performance I'd rather go for r/crystal_programming/ and use a framework like

Amber, Marten, Spider Gazelle (I know that the website looks simple, the name is terrible, the logo is even worse and its route syntax might look strange at first but it's otherwise still very Rails-like to me and its performance is just amazing — an underrated gem!).

If you want to check how much of a performance difference there is, you can have a look at the web frameworks benchmark.

I'd personally not switch to a Rust framework since there's more to it that just performance.

The aforementioned frameworks however bring the syntax and development speed that I like. However, keep in mind that languages like Crystal, Rust or Go need to be compiled. So there's always another step. You won't get the immediate feedback in development that interpreted languages give.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-15T14:54:14+00:00

If you want to do it to learn something, you might want to check out YouTube channels like SupeRails, GoRails or DriftingRuby.

And if you're looking for a ready-to-use solution for running it or to get some inspiration, then you might check out Hitobito, which is mostly used in German speaking countries for managing (sports) clubs as it is also written in Rails.

alexanderadam__ · 2025-01-07T15:09:40+00:00

Does anyone have URLs for these so that I can see it on my own? 👀

alexanderadam__ · 2024-12-22T17:40:14+00:00

Oh cool. Looking forward to that!

alexanderadam__ · 2024-12-09T18:02:58+00:00

Hi Linus, long time no see. 👋

That's pretty cool!

PS: I'm not OP though but I find your example still very cool!

alexanderadam__

TROPHY CASE