The death of a software craftsman
Well, it happens a lot ‘round here
You think quality is a common goal
That goes to show how little you know

Developers work hard over the years to cultivate tools and techniques to improve the quality of the construction of their software. These tools and techniques are slowly becoming even more useless than they may already be. We must adapt by either going all-in, totally opting-out, or finding a middle ground by tracking the AI code-generation craze to fill the gap as a hand-coding artisan.

I’ve thought deeply about building CLIs and built a lot of them over the years. I’ve used Rake, Thor, my own gem GLI and many others. After all that, the venerable OptionParser—part of Ruby’s standard library—is the best choice for scripting and sub-command (git-like) CLIs. I want to show you how.

When a system isn’t working, it’s far easier to debug the problem when that system produces good error messages as well as useful diagnostics. Silent failures are sadly the norm, because they are just easier to implement. Systems based on conventions or automatic configuration exacerbate this problem, as they tend to just do nothing and produce no error message. Let’s see how to fix this.

This is a whirlwind tour of the basics of Brut, where I build a blog from scratch in a bit over 15 minutes. The app is fully tested and even has basic observability as a bonus. The only software you need to install is Docker.

Working on an update to my Docker-based Dev Environment Book, I realized it would be important to show how to get an LSP server worker inside Docker. And I have! And it’s not that easy, but wasn’t that hard, either. It hits a lot of my limits of Neovim knowledge, but hopefully fellow Vim users will find this helpful.

I bought a Framework laptop a couple weeks ago, set it up with stock Ubuntu, and used it for my primary computer for a week. It’s the first time I’ve used Linux in earnest in 20 years. It’s amazing how much has changed and how much hasn’t.

Postgres provides two ways to store a timestamp: TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE (or timestamptz). I’ve always recommended using the later, as it alleviates all confusion about time zones. Let’s see why.