Joshua Wood

Microblog

I really enjoyed all of the talks at Blue Ridge Ruby. It’s so much work to create a good presentation—thanks to all of the speakers! Here are some moments from day two (Friday).

Travis Turner of Evil Martians presents a slide at Blue Ridge Ruby conference featuring an image of a lively classroom discussion, engaging with the audience while pointing to the projected content. Louis Antonopoulos presents at Blue Ridge Ruby conference on "Glimpses of Humanity: My Game-Building AI Pair," wearing a shirt with a Van Gogh-inspired design, addressing an audience with a slide displayed behind him. Rachael Wright-Munn presents on "Validate Me! Demystifying Rails Validators" at Blue Ridge Ruby conference, gesturing expressively while addressing the audience, with the presentation title displayed on the screen behind her. Dustin Haefele-Tschanz presents "The Pursuit of Happiness: Applying Studies in Positive Psychology to Optimize Well-being" at Blue Ridge Ruby conference, engaging the audience with a slide displayed behind him, featuring his contact information and professional title. Confreaks Owner/CEO Cindy Backman presents a lightening talk at Blue Ridge Ruby conference. Jeremy Smith praises the work of Andy Croll and others at Blue Ridge Ruby conference, with a photo of Andy and a webpage screenshot projected behind him.

Have we considered that Mulder and Scully are actually not good special agents and that’s why they’re in a made-up department that the brass created to fuck with them?

It’s not perfect, but Bluesky is my favorite social network by far. What is it about Bluesky?

Got my first development environment (Jekyll website) running in NixOS on my Framework laptop using devenv. That makes this my first successful dev environment in nix. :) Nice work, Domen!

Remember when Twitter and Reddit had entire developer ecosystems built around their open APIs? Those were the days.

I tried something new with my last short blog post about writing. I recorded a narrated version of it. In addition to writing more, I’d like to be more practiced and comfortable speaking into a microphone.

Thank you for RailsConf

This year, Ruby Central announced that 2025 will be the last RailsConf. While I’m sad to lose a favorite Ruby conference, it’s for the best. The Ruby Central team will be able to focus on their core mission: supporting the Ruby language.

There is so much work to do and so much opportunity to improve Ruby’s community and ecosystem. I’m excited to see what Ruby Central will do with their renewed focus, but they must be well-funded to succeed. If you love Ruby, consider becoming a monthly sustaining member—and ask your employer to do the same:

https://rubycentral.org/support/

One last thing—It’s too easy to create caricatures of each other, to assume the worst, to forget about the people behind the avatars. Let’s come together to build the best language, frameworks, and community that we can.

Thank you, Ruby Central, for so many wonderful years of RailsConf!

As a former freelancer, I wonder what non-developer founders think about AI coding agents. Twelve years ago, many of the Rails rescue projects I worked on resulted from poorly maintained codebases that the client had hacked on themselves in some cases.

Will the new “rescue project” be code that has had Copilot Workspace PRs uncritically merged by various actors over the years?