Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦

11 May

Just a reminder that all of my OSS projects are temporarily in maintenance mode. I’m keeping an eye on issues in case something urgent comes up but it’s very unlikely I will be active for some time. I’m still very excited about these projects but I’m dealing with some personal issues at the moment.

Milieu is my first fully offline capable web app. This offline/online indicator has been quite fun to build.

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I enjoyed being a Ruby and Rails developer. But I honestly doubt I will use either Ruby or Rails for any new projects. TypeScript and Svelte let you go so much further with web apps.

I’m excited to share details of how some of this stuff is built. The sync engine, CRDT and rich text editor are all custom.

Milieu is my first fully offline capable web app. This offline/online indicator has been quite fun to build.

Our sync engine is pretty cool too. The CRDT and live presence indicators continue to work between offline browser tabs, and it’s compacted before syncing to the server when you come back online.

Developing with Rails was all about smart compromises. How can you get 90% of the value with 10% of the effort? I was really good at finding that leverage. Now I feel like I can reach for the best possible experience instead, because I can write so much more high-quality code in so much less time.

I thought I found a bug in @milieu.cloud as todos were disappearing from my Inbox. Then I realised ChatGPT was proactively filing them neatly into their respective projects. It even spotted a duplicate and removed it. I forgot that I had asked it to do that. 🤣

It’s been absolutely delightful building a Svelte-assed Svelte app with SQLite and Litestream backups.

Milieu@milieu.cloud

SQLite and Svelte is a killer stack!

Having one app that combines contacts and todos means you can build date pickers like this.

After about a decade of wishing for it, I finally made an app that feels like Things but with the ability to collaborate with other people — and now also with my agents. 🤩🤩🤩

I’m looking for a few alpha testers for a personal productivity app I’ve been building. Ideally you already use a todo list or CRM, Claude/ChatGPT with MCP and macOS or iOS. Native apps come later though. Involves an onboarding call and a feedback call about week later. Interested?

This is true. Fable 5 and now Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 reliably write code that’s as good as if not better than I would have written myself. And they do it 100 times faster. They’re not making “slop” or tech debt. They’re creating high quality tested, maintainable software that works.

Mike McQuaid@mikemcquaid.com

The average developer needs to accept that the latest tier of foundation models writes better code than them. Most developers who think they are above average are not. It’s time to learn how to be effective writing code with AI or be left behind.

Unfortunately I still can’t say the same of Astra or Sol or any other model, but OpenAI is getting close and the open source / open weights models aren’t that far behind.

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦 reposted

Drew Bragg

@drbragg.dev

Welp... Got laid off from Podia today. Kinda a lot to process for a Thursday. I'll have something more coherent to say eventually. For now, send Ruby/Rails leads. Or dog pictures.... Both are good.

Fable 5 was the point where AI got **really good**. And Opus 5.5 was the point where really good AI got cheap enough for me to afford to use it for significant amounts of OSS. I felt pretty disheartened working on OSS lately when trad coding was the only option for me so I’m excited to get back.

**Really good** is my own subjective measurement that essentially means it can reliably write new novel code that’s as good as if not better than I would have written myself.

Claude’s new Projects feature is the best coding experience yet. By far.

rubyschema.orgRubySchemaJSON Schemas for common configuration files in Ruby projects. Auto-complete, validation and inline documentation for YAML, JSON and TOML configs.

I still maintain JSON schemas for RuboCop, Rails, Kamal, Lefthook, Brakeman, Packwerk, Standard, Sidekiq, Shoryuken, Honeybadger, RoRvsWild, Scout, PgHero, Locale files, i18n-tasks, Blazer, Mongoid, and Vite Ruby config files. They’re compatible with most modern text editors www.rubyschema.org

Do people still use text editors? 🤔

I recently discovered Airsoft is like an FPS video game except the graphics are way better, ping is 0, it keeps you extremely physically fit if you’re competitive and hanging out with real friends in real life is way more fun.

21 Sept

How is anyone working within their Claude Max limits? We need an Ultra plan.

21 Sept

If they had a $1,000 / month plan that was *actually* 5× Max, we’d probably go for it.

11 Sept

Hey everyone, I know Phlex, Literal, Ruby Schema, etc. are due some maintenance and love and a new release. Things are calming down a little in my life now and I should be able to get back to what I was doing before pretty soon. ❤️

11 Sept

Also, I don’t know which one but I’m really hoping to get to a Ruby conference soon. It’s been too long. Miss you guys.

10 Sept

Mid developers calling Tailwind a “shitty piece of software” is so boring. Tailwind solves real problems well. It’s well designed, well documented and has a reputation for being well maintained. Modern CSS alone does not and cannot solve the same problems Tailwind solves.

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦 reposted

Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦

@mackuba.eu

21 Aug

FFS, this is so fucked… 😩 Would it kill the people here to not chase away any tech person who comes here and says something about AI?… I really want tech discussions and communities to hang out here and not on Elon's far-right playground 😐

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦 reposted

Collin Donnell

@collin.social

20 Aug

Where are people successfully finding job opportunities as software engineers? I had a couple of referrals, but they haven't gotten back to me. I've put in a bunch of applications at companies I thought were interesting. Other than someone approaching me directly, I'm not sure what's effective.

rubyforum.orgLiteral 2 feature preview: Variance and higher-order typesLiteral 2 can tell whether one type is a subtype of another. The rule: type a is a subtype of type b if it can be proven that every object permitted by a is also permitted by b. These comparisons work...

4 Aug

I shared some details on subtyping, variance and higher-order types coming to Literal 2. This is more of an internal capability of the type system; I’ll share more details about some of the features it powers soon.

rubyforum.orgLiteral 2 feature preview: Slices and DraftsWe’ve been working hard on the next version of Literal which will bring a ton of new features and improvements. I’d like to share a couple of them here. I’d love to hear your thoughts and I hope to sh...

31 July

I shared some details about slices and drafts coming to Literal 2. www.rubyforum.org/t/literal-2-...

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦 reposted

Andrea Fomera

@afomera.dev

31 July

actually sad to read this all out. Ruby Central was foundational in my early career. I learned so much from conference videos and so forth early in. The relationships I built in the hallways of RailsConf and RubyConf stand through my career today. But Ruby Central is not the same as it once was.

André Arko@indirect.io

I wrote an update on the dispute with Ruby Central over Bundler and RubyGems. I'm sad it's reached this point, especially since Ruby Central's conferences are a big part of what convinced me to join the Ruby community back in the day. andre.arko.net/2026/07/30/rub…

andre.arko.netRuby Central's Destructive LegacyAt conferences and meetups, and in conversations online, many Ruby developers have asked me about Ruby Central and my disagreement with them. This post is my attempt to answer the questions I’ve been getting over and over, covering: 1) what is Ruby Central doing now? 2) has the dispute over Bundler…

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦 reposted

Current meta is to say “hi“ to Fable as soon as you wake up to start the 5-hour count down so it resets at about midday.

Learned a bunch of fantastic new phrases lately: 1. Token-bound — when one’s performance is limited by a lack of AI tokens. 2. Trad programmer (or coder) — someone who writes code by hand. 3. Token laundering — when you let a colleague Slack you a prompt to run with your own AI allowance.

4. Transport vegan — one who refuses to use Uber for ethical reasons. 5. Eventual inconsistency — GitHub’s apparent architecture under Microsoft.

If I had a few hundred thousand dollars a year in AI tokens to spend, could I be that much more productive than if we hired another engineer? I don’t know, but this is starting to look more realistic than ever. And what is the limit?

At the moment I definitely feel token-bound, and that’s with very generous allowances and max plans everywhere.

@fifthcolumnblue.bsky.social

Will we get to the point where engineers command a token budget that’s multiples of their own salary? Is the only reason we’re not there yet because we haven’t adjusted to it or is it actually not cost effective yet?

There is only so much code I can review, but reviewing also gets easier when you can spawn a bunch of super intelligent subagents.

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧❤️🇺🇦 reposted

Fifthcolumnblue

Argentina.

Driving an automatic car has got to be one of the worst experiences you can put yourself through. 😤

17 July

We have so many exciting features and improvements coming to Literal 2, and if you can get by without the docs, most of them are usable already in main.

17 July

Is bi “not gay” and “not straight” though? I think of myself as both gay and straight.

shawn@mulchy.bsky.social

on this day in 1995, scientists discovered bisexuality. happy 31st birthday to all my fellow bs

17 July

But I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about set theory.

16 July

Is there an alternative to Cursor Cloud automations that lets you use subagents? Nothing seems to support this yet.