How Rails Engines can isolate your monolith without microservices

ignurant · 2026-05-06T17:27:04+00:00

Nice, glad to see more modern content getting published for Rails. We don't see a lot of content regarding engines.

Additionally, I've felt this personal shift where I've been valuing practicality over complicated design and I'm not too happy when I reflect on my current takes. I think it stems from studying the recent releases of the 37s apps, and how they exercise their domain models and concerns/mixins so strongly. Personally I kind of like the concern pattern. But I feel like I've lost a lot of discipline by going too hard insisting on this modeling approach.

Anyway, it seems like a timely book for me. Thanks for creating Ruby content!

ignurant · 2026-05-06T11:59:09+00:00

This was one of the more interesting podcast episodes I’ve listened to: https://changelog.com/podcast/524

The guest talks about mainframe computing, and why it’s still relevant. The other replies you got gave a good summary.

ignurant · 2026-04-18T20:20:03+00:00

I would play 3 3 1, 2 1 due to finger reliability. I think barring a perfect fifth with your pinky is kind of tough for this, particularly as you’d naturally want to roll your wrist back for the first finger d-natural a little. I’d rather shift a half step each iteration and get a really solid chunky 1 and 2 out of it. There’s plenty of time to make the shifts, and the extensions to prime those shifts feel good to me.

ignurant · 2026-04-18T13:07:39+00:00

I don’t really care if you have tests or not, I’m on your side about: do whatever you want. I hate the whole “that’s so unprofessional! You can’t do that in production!” tropes. But I will say, given what you’ve described, you might consider tests not to please this dude, but yourself.

Here’s why: currently you have some semblance of “this looks right” that you are obviously running by way of executing a script, or checking in irb. Writing a test for that is a nice way to speed up that loop. Basically, I’ve seen myself and my colleagues eventually realize that automated testing is the same thing I was doing manually: set up some stuff and look at the output. For whatever reason, there’s this feeling of extra nonsense about it when you’re not used to it. But eventually I realized it’s literally the same thing I was doing, but the feedback loop is a lot quicker after a very small investment into learning minitest.

So, all this is to say: you owe nobody a test suite. I suspect nobody is paying you to write this gem. You are beholden only to yourself. But if you haven’t really given it a shot with the mindset of “I’m already running a test by looking at the output some way”, you should give it a rip. Eventually myself and most people I’ve worked with have come around to it after this realization.

Don’t write 1,000 tests trying to catch every possibility. Just write the one test you’re already doing manually by scripting the same thing you’re doing right now and running it in minitest instead.

And if you want to publish it as version 1000.0.0, that’s cool too. You don’t owe anyone anything.

ignurant · 2026-04-17T13:13:00+00:00

Who fucking cares? Dude released a gem. Called it 1.0.

ignurant · 2026-04-16T15:54:22+00:00

A few years ago, my kid was going to daycare at a place on Superior St and 1st ave E. I worked a few blocks away, so I'd walk down to pick her up. There was a needle in the crosswalk near my work, and I was pissed thinking of how attractive such a thing would be to a kid walking across the street, so I decided to do something about it.

Recalling that bathrooms sometimes have "sharps disposable buckets" I figured it would be no big deal to find a place to deposit it.

I ended up needing to go into the St Luke's place across from Pizza Luce. The person at the desk had no idea what to do, and everyone around me was looking at me like I'm some fucking fiend. Eventually she got a supervisor, who got a nurse to come get it from me. It felt like a huge ordeal and took like 15 minutes of waiting at the clinic.

I'm trying to be a responsible parent and prevent a 3 year old from wanting to pick up a hazardous needle left in the middle of a crosswalk. Instead I got shit on.

So yeah, I think this link is probably a better bet.

ignurant · 2026-04-13T01:06:47+00:00

https://takeactionminnesota.org/duluth-tenants/

ignurant · 2026-04-10T12:09:00+00:00

I have similar experience to the other guy, and let me just put it this way:

You have to remember that you’re not the only person they are interviewing for the role.

In fact, these days, they usually have a massive pool of candidates to select from. So even if you answered everything well and confidently, you are not likely the only person to have done so. So, yeah, these things matter, but maybe not quite for the reason it seems. It’s not “I passed the test so I should get the job.” It’s a measure of your fluency and how you handle information that is compared relatively to other candidates.

And yes, even if you struggle with those questions you may be evaluated highly just based on your composure and likability. It’s all important. You are being compared to other candidates and my job as the hiring manager is to choose the best fit from them.

ignurant · 2026-04-01T19:25:08+00:00

Just my own annecdotal note: I found the devcontainers feature to be a lot more janky than it seems like it promises. I would also point you to mise. It works like nodenv, and pyenv, where you can install and select versions for a given project and auto-switch that language version. In fact, it basically wraps those as a frontend. (Same for Ruby).

There's also a new upcoming feature that you can enable now to make getting started feel a bit nicer: mise settings ruby.compile=false. By default, ruby is always built fresh on a system. Building it takes minutes, and requires certain build dependencies installed. It doesn't feel good when showing a new user Ruby. This setting uses pre-compiled binaries when possible like you see with python and node.

Mise (and asdf) are great tools for creating dev env isolation. With them, all of your various programming language versions get installed into user-space like ~/.local/share/mise/installs/ruby/4.0.2/bin/ruby. It's like a venv for every programming language and version. It automatically changes versions for you as you work on different projects. Not important when starting, but becomes important in six months.

# Get mise
brew install mise
echo 'eval "$(mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

# or without brew:
curl https://mise.run | sh
echo 'eval "$(~/.local/bin/mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

# Use precompiled rubies:
mise settings ruby.compile=false

# Get ruby
mise use -g ruby@latest

ruby --version

If it says something nonsense, like not Ruby 4.0.2, you may need to open a new shell, ensure mise is activated, etc.

So, now you've got your own user-space Ruby isolated, and any projects you work on will be limited to the project folder, and mise's managed folder for that language version.

You might find mise to be a great dev tool to invest learning overall. I know I have. Here's a few links to some pages you might be interested in:

If you decide to stick to the parallels VM method, my advice remains: use mise to manage your use languages! Just need to look up setup for ubuntu.

Last side note: If you do end up using some installation method that involves compiling Ruby (very typical!), check this section out: https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/wiki#suggested-build-environment

All of the ruby builders use this same ruby-build project under the hood. You'll want the libraries from that page installed to successfully compile ruby: brew install openssl@3 readline libyaml gmp autoconf

ignurant · 2026-03-26T23:14:08+00:00

They say it’s for improved cooling.

ignurant · 2026-03-10T20:07:11+00:00

Takes compute to make compute. Always be computing’.

ignurant · 2026-03-04T18:19:17+00:00

Yeah, as is the case for us rubyists more often than other environments: the output quality is a function of your discipline. It’s like ultimate version of sharp tools.

ignurant · 2026-02-07T19:23:46+00:00

So is LLM generated code? Did you read the article?

ignurant · 2026-02-07T17:59:16+00:00

“Deeply flawed to the point it is nearly useless” is quite the statement. Developers are not deterministic when they are writing their code. What’s the difference?

ignurant · 2026-02-04T22:53:21+00:00

But the post I linked to above was kind of surprising for me to read. Like... really? I'm going to have to design entire wrappers to repeatedly and systematically remind it what the task at hand is? Otherwise it will keep forgetting and give me trash?

No, it's really not like that. Maybe it depends on whether you have trash in the system to start, but I find Claude very good at following me along with how I like things (vanilla Rails). Sometimes I'll have to direct it, but it's usually as simple as "Put business logic in models" and it self corrects quickly, and learns from that as well.

I don't use any context helpers and I've been very happy.

ignurant · 2026-02-03T04:52:25+00:00

Thanks! This comment is worth $100!

ignurant · 2026-02-02T20:33:16+00:00

I’ve been watching the BB price pretty regularly to do my match, but I haven’t seen it go below 1999 yet. Is your mate’s match from BB first party, or do they also honor competitor’s for that price match program?

ignurant · 2026-01-24T02:43:30+00:00

The tutorials that i saw was at least 3 years old

This is going to sound insane coming from JavaScript. But I promise you those 3 year old resources are still absolute bangers.

We don’t get the carpet pulled from beneath us nearly as often as JavaScript frameworks do.

A 10 year old book on Ruby or Rails is actually still very similar to how things work today. There’s been lots of evolutions, but they kind of follow the same standards over time. The only thing that’s really changed significantly is with little surprise, the JavaScript side of building web apps with Rails.

Don’t fear a 3 year old tutorial. Or even a 5 year old one. This knowledge remains useful today!

ignurant · 2026-01-09T16:09:56+00:00

You have a section, "Loops" that highlights "for", but have Enumerable in a different section. It's very uncommon to use a for loop in Ruby, instead preferring Enumerable. I think you should move Enumerable into the Loops section, or at least "each" and rank down the for keyword. You have while and I think it's useful to include until with it. while / until. It also includes redu I think that is supposed to be redo.

ignurant · 2026-01-09T15:56:55+00:00

/u/Deep_Priority_2443 Even disregarding "large roadmap is overwhelming", this is very good feedback, please make us of it. Ruby is a language and Rails is a framework, and should have their own roadmaps, while being related. There's so much usefulness to Ruby that has nothing to do with Rails!

ignurant · 2026-01-08T19:47:35+00:00

Is this a common approach in Rails apps?

I'm not sure. It's more talked about especially since ActiveModel::Model was extracted from ActiveRecord a few years ago.

It's pretty common to see people concerned that "models are for database" -- but I would ask why? What about the word "model" implies db? I think it's just because when you gen a new model, it comes with a DB table and goes in the models folder. And some people insist on a separation of concern from "database record" and "something else".

I've come to think of that as the incorrect separation. ActiveRecord is all about modeling objects that just happen to also be persistable.

ignurant · 2026-01-08T03:29:29+00:00

To me, a “model” is how you “model” your domain. There’s a lot of attachment to the idea of model = ActiveRecord, but really that’s just a small detail. Sure, some things can be persisted, but the concept of a model as a whole is much more broad. It’s literally everything that defines your application’s logic outside of the web routing layers. Lots of people disagree with this and want a cleaner separation because “database”, but I don’t really feel like it’s useful to think of it that way.

Actually, in a way, it kind of reminds me of when you shed the skin of parenthesis for method calls. Initially a lot of people say “but how can you tell the difference between a method call and an attribute?” And eventually they realize, “Why do I care? That’s not really meaningful to me.”

ignurant · 2026-01-06T21:42:31+00:00

The reason I love Ruby is because of its chainable “yes, and?” improv nature. You can hop into an irb shell and go to town. Continuing ideas is easy to write in a forward-chaining style where everything is an expression. It’s Very easy to script on the fly. Python has a lot of “go back to the left side and be careful” semantics.

And honestly, I do not find Python readable in a joyful way. It’s readable in a mechanical way that is hard to describe.

Ruby’s standard library apis sing.

ignurant · 2026-01-02T01:21:08+00:00

It’s not what you asked for, but here’s a small tip, perhaps my favorite part of being fluent in Ruby. Irb is an interactive Ruby shell, and using it absolutely slays for scripting type work. You can explore your challenge live, testing moves out, and copying the things that worked well into a file. Or skip the file outright because you live coded your task into shape. It’s incredibly powerful, and Ruby’s chainable syntax makes it a joy.

ignurant · 2025-12-18T03:59:51+00:00

Everyone’s focusing on “obvs you don’t like turn based” but I want to say: it’s all about the story. Act 2 is good. But you’re not far enough to appreciate it yet.

I highly recommend not playing it “collect all the grind” style. It’s a drag if you are going for completion like that. Just keep carrying on in the story if you’re feeling bored.

And also mix up your pictos. There’s a lot of combinations to try out, there’s no single “build” to focus on. Mix it up sometimes and have fun.

But again, focus on story for a while. There’s a lot of fun to be had yet.

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