In May 2026, we are now five months post-Opus-4.5 and the great “Christmas Break Revolution” that saw us all hunkered down in front of our laptops over the new year. I’m now about nine to twelve months into not writing code by hand anymore. I more or less spend 100% of my time that I used to spend typing in IDEs instead talking to LLMs in Pi.11 Seriously, have you tried Pi yet? You’re a hacker, aren’t you? Why are you eating at the sloptrough of a trillion dollar company and whatever their product managers think you need in an LLM harness, and instead build your own like the hacker you were…
A recent episode of the Rails Business Podcast was about “striving for ideal code”. The hosts are both typical “Rails Indie” owner/operators: a small team building a small SaaS. They were discussing a new podcast which is out from 37signals called “Recordables”. The discussion was envy for how good and clean 37signals’ code was. This is a fair assessment. They’ve been open-sourcing a lot of real world products lately, including: Campfire, the chat app. Fizzy, the Kanban tool. If you read them, the code looks great. We’ve only seen glimpses of this Rails style, which David has alluded to or…
In 2019, I had a few mindset shifts around recurring, daily or near-daily work. In short: Frequency first. Duration next. Then, quality. Make progress every day. Any progress counts, duration + quality should go unmeasured. Old goal: Run a marathon in 2019. New goal: Run every day. Old goal: Write 1000 words every day. New goal: Write every day. Yikes. In the past, I was very focused on big-picture goals which had very specific targets. Make $X/year in my freelancing business, run this many miles, write this many words. I even had burndown charts. This approach never lasted more than a month…
Another year has come and gone. 2019 was a pretty wild year for me, with a number of big life events and transformations like I haven’t had in a long time. It was also a year in which I confronted my inner life more earnestly, which is something I had only started to do in 2018. Here’s a review of my 2019. My Business (Almost) Doubled Presenting at RubyKaigi So, I’ll start with the big bang, the thing I’m most proud of. My freelancing - a combination of book sales, client work, and workshops - doubled in top-line revenue this year. Expenses were a lot higher too, but I’m still taking home a…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the importance of how ideas are packaged, and the effect this has on persuading the intended audience of the idea. Mostly this was due to the Dolly Parton’s America podcast telling the story about how Dolly Parton’s involvement in the 9 to 5 movie and soundtrack supported the feminist movement of the 80’s, while Dolly Parton is a country singer that does not identify as a feminist. Despite that, her soundtrack (and the movie itself), expresses feminist, left-wing ideas. What a way to make a livin’. Idea packaging is comprised of a number of related elements:…
There are many different responsibilities for the maintenance of an open source project, and while some of them get called “maintainership”, I’m not sure they should be. Let’s zoom out for a moment. What labor must be performed, by someone, anyone - in any successful open source project? Writing code - fixing bugs, writing new features, refactoring old code. Writing documentation - explaining why things are the way they are. Recording intention and design, and how to use the APIs provided. Issue triage. Making bug reporters create reproducing examples. Closing issues that are stale or…
That’s me on Shark Tank. It’s episode 12 or 13 of season 1. When I was 19 years old, I appeared on the American reality television show Shark Tank. The premise is simple: entrepreneurs pitch a hard-boiled set of investors to give them money for a piece of their business. It’s based on a Japanese television show called Dragon’s Den. I appeared on Shark Tank in 2009. I wasn’t shy about it - it’s been a part of my “bio” for years. What I have been afraid to say to others, though, is that I didn’t have a very good time during or after my appearance. The Sharks didn’t invest in my company, and I…
In June of 2016, I received an email: The original email Dear sir: I’m from Syria , expected to graduate this semester (Computer Science) , and as you sir my role model in Ruby also Rails , I need some advice about open source projects in Ruby to learn from. Thanks in advance and sorry if I waste your time Actually, he wasn’t just in Syria. He was at the University of Aleppo. His name was Mohammed. Russian drone footage of Aleppo in February 2016. Mohammed: ‘The damage now is much much bigger than this video.’ Youtube At this point, the Syrian Civil War had been raging in Aleppo for almost…
Did I mention how awesome it is to live 30 minutes from a ski lift? In March of 2016, I launched a course called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. Since then, I have distributed just over 1800 copies, for a gross revenue of $220,033.50 (about $1000/week). Although I launched the course in March, I had worked on it for about 4 months. Releasing the course has been a lifechanging event for me. For the first time ever, I made more money over a year from product revenue rather than service revenue. Releasing the course nearly doubled my usual freelancing rate, allowed me to change my…
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