Dennis Martinez

If you've ever wondered how to automate web application deployments using Kamal, I got a video for you: youtu.be/k11rH_qMthw

A new Rails features that's not talked about much is local CI. It's a fast and easy way to make sure your app is ready to ship, without having to wait for your CI service to run. I wrote an article about it and how to set it up on an existing Rails app. dev-tester.com/speed-up-you...

I whipped up a quick 8-minute video showing how to use one of Kamal's new features: spinning up a local Docker container registry for deployments. It's a much-needed update that makes Kamal even easier to use. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFVW...

You may have noticed I'm a huge fan of Kamal for deploying web apps. It's now gotten even better since now we don't have to set up a remote container registry for simple deploys. Here's a quick write-up on how to enable it for existing Kamal configurations. dennmart.com/articles/usi...

I recently bought my first vertical mouse (Keychron M5). It took some time to get used to it but it makes a huge difference in how my wrist feels after a day of work. It's really easy to forget about ergonomics, but we need to make sure to take care of ourselves better.

If you're like me and have a somewhat uneasy feeling about the increasing usage of AI and LLMs, @theoatmeal.bsky.social published this brilliant piece talking about it. While it's from a cartoonist's perspective, it definitely applies to all creators. theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

A reminder in case anyone needs to hear it: Not all software products need AI functions. They'll still work perfectly fine without it.

It's so disheartening to pick up a new book that you've been excited to read, only to see that most of it feels like low-effort, clearly AI-generated content.

Am I the only one seeing a sudden increase of buggy behavior on apps that rarely had any issues before? I'm guessing companies are letting people vibe-code their way through their daily work without much in the way of QA or reviews.

I don't care that people say em dashes are a clear sign of AI writing, I'm going to continue to use them as I always have.

Ever since GitHub Copilot started to enforce monthly usage limits, I've been using it far less. The free models are almost useless, and the premium models consume way to much of the monthly usage for even the simplest queries. I don't think I'll renew when my current subscription is up.

"I can't find the issue, this is working on my machine." As a tester, you've probably seen this message on a closed ticket more times than you'd like. Does that mean that you should just give up? You shouldn't. Read more in the latest Dev Tester article. dev-tester.com/works-on-my-...

Every time I go to the post office to send something to my family in Puerto Rico, I always cause chaos and commotion because no one knows where Puerto Rico exists and have no clue how to send stuff there. It always takes at least 20 minutes for them to figure it out.

Nothing like getting job offers to commit fraud.

Cell phones these days aren't built to last. My phone has been shutting off and looks like it's on its last legs after 3 years of use. Meanwhile I recently found my old flip phone from 2005 and after a quick charge it powered up like nothing with all data intact.

When is it acceptable for me to act smug about having my apps deployed on my own servers using Kamal, thus bypassing the great Heroku meltdown of 2025?

If you watched YouTube videos before 2010, I guarantee this song is forever embedded in your brain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKfS...

Here's my second-to-last video in this series about using Kamal to build a review app workflow for your projects. Kamal doesn't have a way to check if the review app server is already set up, so this video talks about using hooks to figure out which step to take. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNed...

I really want to keep trying to do YouTube videos, but after a year of slow progress I still don't feel fully comfortable with being on camera. Maybe it's time to reassess this goal.

I've noticed that every time I talk with someone I haven't chatted with in years and tell them that my life is pretty much the same as the last time we spoke, I feel a bit of shame. Why is that? Since when is maintaining a good thing considered a bad thing?

I've been reading Tiny Experiments by @neuranne.bsky.social and even halfway through I've gotten a ton out of the book. The mindset shift around treating procrastination as a tool for self-discovery instead of berating myself has been extremely useful already.

It amazes me that there are a lot of companies out there that let you work remotely, but require you to have your webcam on at all times during working hours.

I spent the better part of the week trying to figure out why a Turbo Frame in a Rails app didn't work as expected, only to discover it's a Turbo bug that was reported 8 months ago 🤦‍♂️

I've opened more pull requests for open source projects this week than I did in probably the last 5 years combined (e.g. close to zero PRs). It feels pretty good to pitch in and help. I should do this a lot more often.

A few weeks ago I got a Boox Note Air4 C e-ink tablet and it's become my favorite device to carry with me. I've finally read a lot of PDF books I've purchased throughout the years that I completely neglected, and the writing experience is also surprisingly great. shop.boox.com/collections/...

Books are incredible. One day you're reading a chapter and it feels like a complete waste of time. Then a few days or weeks down the road, those same pages are now full of lessons and sparks of inspiration.

Finally home after some flight delays. Matsuyama, you were wonderful and #RubyKaigi was amazing. Looking forward to next year's event.

Coming from Osaka where everywhere is overflowing with travelers, the main tourist spots in Matsuyama feel empty in comparison. There needs to be a much better distribution of tourists coming to Japan.

Just a few more days before RubyKaigi, looking forward to it! I just realize I haven't been to a conference since I moved to Japan nine years ago. It's been far too long.

Me waiting since 2021 for @frame.work to begin selling and shipping their laptops to Japan.

Been here for nine years and it never gets old seeing the cherry blossoms starting to bloom in spring.

I began trying out Claude 3.7 Sonnet in the past two days since I've heard good things since this model came out. It's blown my mind with how much better it is with coding tasks compared to ChatGPT's existing models. Looks like I'm going to switch over my paid subscription soon.

It's crazy that Rancid's "...And Out Come the Wolves" album turns 30 this year. The whole album is so good and still holds up.

I know so many engineering teams that should heed the advice in this article by @polotek.bsky.social polotek.net/posts/the-fr...

I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but the combination of caffeine with L-Theanine seem to give me incredible focus throughout the day. Whatever magic this is, I'm all for it.

I almost had my transactional email service shut down today, thanks to someone spamming the registration form of one my sites with bogus emails that bounced.

The latest edition of the Software Testing Weekly newsletter features my latest article 🙌 Check out the newsletter if you want to expand your testing mindset (and if you're a developer, you should always be doing that!) softwaretestingweekly.com/issues/262

While Tailwind is still my go-to CSS framework for my own projects, I've been working on a project that uses Bootstrap and admittedly it isn't that bad these days, especially if you use it with a tool like Sass. I think it gets way too much unnecessary hate by devs nowadays.

The only reason I want tools like this to become successful is to force companies to stop doing the types of interviews where it could help the interviewee cheat—since it usually doesn't reflect the day-to-day work of whoever they're trying to hire.

If you're building an event-driven application that uses AWS services, I highly recommend using LocalStack (www.localstack.cloud). The community edition works so well for quick testing of event-driven architecture before deploying.

I'm thinking about giving away my TestCafe book for free, and optionally asking for a one-time payment/donation to access the practice website I built for it. Let me know if this is something you'd be interested in.