I’ve been using a lot of Git Trailers in my commit messages recently and as my thinking on which trailer keys to use has evolved, it’s been useful to look back at which ones have been used before.

I’ve been tinkering with a modified, task-only Bullet Journaling approach in Obsidian for about a week now and it’s been nice, so I wanted to write up how I’m approaching things.

Yesterday I posted that I’d resolved my new microblog POSSE¹ posts from generating link previews on Mastodon and Bluesky. Today, I want to briefly run through how I managed that.

Articles on Hearthside are written in Markdown (GitHub-flavored), but the file extension is .md.yaml as they also make use of Jekyll-style front matter. My Frontmatter gem requires that files it handles end in .yaml or .yml, so this is necessary.

After yesterday’s post, it was time to finally try to handle a blog post and Cooklang recipe in one file. The solution to how to format things was simple: inline the recipe in a Markdown code fence and pre-process it.

You’ll probably read this recipe and think wait, this is just overnight oats but you’d be wrong, because this is a recipe for overnight oats that someone who cares about you remembered to make for you last night. At least that’s how I interpret my 3-year-old’s mis-hearing or pronunciation of us...

The approach I take to defining ViewModels for SwiftUI was heavily inspired by Paul Hudson’s post Introducing MVVM into your SwiftUI project. In it, he advocates for defining class ViewModel inside an extension to the relevant view. By naming each view’s MVVM class ViewModel, it can always be...

I’m frequently wanting to work with truncated dates in Swift apps, especially when dealing with Swift Charts. Foundation provides Calendar.startOfDay(for:) to get the first moment of a day, and that’s been really useful. The extension below will do something similar for an arbitrary¹ ...

Starship is a highly-configurable, cross-shell prompt. I recently switched to using it and it sped up my prompt rendering from being noticably slow and taking probably half a second to render to an imperceptible 0.03s rendering time. It actually does slightly more than my old prompt did as well...

Sending a From header is part of building a polite crawler, along with respecting Robots.txt and sending a unique User-Agent. The From header simply contains an email address that can be used by the site’s owner to reach out if your bot is creating any issues for them.

Hacker News doesn’t send Webmentions when a post is created like Lobste.rs will, and there’s not currently a service on sites like Brid.gy that will provide them for you. Even the Hacker News API doesn’t provide search or filtering by site. Luckily, there is a service provided by Algolia that ...

Atuin is a tool and labor of love built by Ellie Huxtable that runs in the background to capture commands you’ve entered. It stores these locally in a SQLite database and provides a great CLI tool to search through that history, provide stats of what commands you frequently run, and optionally...

When upgrading to Rails 7.1 with any models using the encrypts macro from ActiveRecord::Encryption, be wary of upgrading the config.load_defaults in config/application.rb from 7.0 to 7.1. The 7.1 defaults for ActiveRecord::Encryption include a combination of settings that can lead to your app...

Back in 2023 I quietly published my /uses slashpage. Today I gave it a pass to update things that had fallen out of date.

Notify sites that you have linked to them with extra context: is your content a reply, a review, a bookmark, or even a checkin?

Today rather than publishing a lengthier post, I’ll point you to some work I’ve done on this site’s design.

Easily view the source of a function or method in your terminal using Git and this shell script.

This is a post I’m mostly writing for my future self, because I can never remember the actual term for the CSS feature that lets you define a color based on another color (it’s “CSS Relative Color”) and “color mix” which is what I keep wanting the feature to be called never turns up any results...

I’ve used URL text fragments in a few posts now and often use it outside of this blog to point someone to a particular piece of text on a page. They’re a really useful feature that allows you to create a URL that links not just to a page or an anchor on that page, but specifically to a bit of...

swift-format is only one of several options for Swift language formatting tools, but as it is part of the official Swift GitHub organization and is built by Apple, it stands a good chance of coming out as the primary one. As of Xcode 16, swift-format is bundled with Apple’s IDE for Swift...

When thinking about how to kick off NaBloPoMo 2024 this past weekend, instead of picking one of several drafts or mostly written articles I naturally decided that we should instead start with something fresh!

When working with a PersistentModel to a widget in SwiftUI, you may run into “failed to find a currently active container” crashes.

Writing methods in RSpec lets us clean up our tests while improving their documentation value and isolation.

SensoryFeedbackSamples is an Open Source multiplatform SwiftUI app that provides a testing palette for SwiftUI’s new .sensoryFeedback(_, trigger:) modifier.

A recipe for a spiced honey cake using the leftover yeast, or lees, from brewing mead

Code dive into parsing dates and times with Swift’s Decodable as formatted by Rails APIs

Build a grid or tessellation of Hexagon shapes in SwiftUI, useful for maps in role-playing games or for artfully displaying photos in a pattern.

I’m a developer, conference speaker and organizer, technical blogger, and mentor with over 13 years of experience in Ruby on Rails and Postgres. I’ve recently been learning iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI and would love to explore a role doing more professionally. Across my career I’ve...

We should use goals and tools that help us to achieve them in ways that best serve us. As you know, I’m participating in NaBloPoMo this year and as you probably also know I’m behind.

D9 was activated as the exodus began.

Like everyone, I use a lot of apps and services for various things. I’m writing this article into Notion right now! I’ll probably check Mastodon in a few minutes. I’m sure I’ll use other apps before the end of the day like Streaks, Reeder, The StoryGraph, Overcast, Serializd, United, and Parcel.

Have you ever read a long book or series with a bunch of storylines and come across some character, item, or place and just had no idea where their story was at this point? That happens to me a lot, and I think it would be really neat to be able to ask my eBook app “what’s Tyrion’s story at this...

Rail’s actionmailbox and Ruby’s mail (used by both actionmailbox and actionmailer) gems create a lot of memory bloat in applications, and they’re often not required for your app.

A pain point I’ve had as I start using “real” cameras such as my Fujifilm X100T and Sony α6400 is that I really miss having location EXIF data attached to the images. I’ve done the adjustment dance a few times when it’s simple enough that I can update all photos in a batch to “the Denver Zoo” or...

I was having trouble the other day opening a console on a Heroku app in a Shield space. I didn’t get any errors when running heroku run console and it was taking the expected several minutes to spin up a dyno for me to connect to, but rather than ever giving me a prompt the command would exit...

You probably have a ruby "3.2.2" directive in your projects’ Gemfiles, and you may also have a .ruby-version file that your Ruby switcher uses.

The Café Mezcal is a twist of the classic espresso martini that leans into the delightful way that coffee and mezcal¹ flavors combine. For folks who don't enjoy mezcal but don't mind tequila, you can switch the proportion of mezcal to tequila or use only tequila.

I’ve been using Streaks to track my goal of reading each day since late April of this year. I don’t have a specific amount I’m trying to read; it’s whatever feels like progress that day. Some days I’ll read a couple of pages but not count it, others I’ll listen for 15 minutes and decide that’s...

With a couple of flags, git stash can shove everything that git commit wouldn’t store into a stash commit.

While I wrote and tried to publish this post on November 9^th, an unrelated change I'd made caused it not to be released until today, the 10^th. Sorry about that.

If you don’t know me well, it may not be obvious that collecting records is the perfect hobby for me: it’s expensive, easy to get passionate about, few people care, and yes, it’s fairly pretentious. Record collecting even has dedicated and beloved shops for its adherents, often questionably lit...

Inspired by Matt Birchler’s “My default apps at the end of 2023” via Adam Fortuna’s “What Apps I Use In 2023” and because I did a good job writing 6 consecutive more or less “real” posts, here are my apps used in 2023. You may consider each of these recommendations.

Notion has been helpful to me in organizing and offloading my thoughts on what articles I’d like to write and features I’d like to add for this blog. My articles usually start with a random thought and I’ll use that as the title for a card in my “Blog Posts” Notion board and possibly add some...

Unlike social media microblogging, there’s not a great story for continuing the conversation of a blog post that’s part of the IndieWeb. Replying to a blog post most often takes the form of a reply to a POSSE¹ syndication like a Mastodon post or promotion link on Hacker News.

A system for highlighting, tabbing, and annotating D&D Adventures and Sourcebooks

Git can “trace the evolution” of a specific method, showing you logs of how it has changed over time.

As a best practice, when you enhance your Rails app’s assets:precompile task to build static assets that can be served faster than if they needed to be compiled at runtime, you should also enhance assets:clobber to remove the artifacts you create.

There’s no better way to prepare a brisket than to smoke it low and slow, like they do in the South. But a true Austin-style smoked brisket doesn’t scratch the itch when Hanukkah, Passover or Rosh Hashanah come around. This recipe combines the seasonings and accompaniments of a braised Jewish...

In the spirit of Daring Fireball and to fill a space between a social post or boost and a full blog post, I’ve created a new feature for Hearthside that allows me to share a link to a web page that I want to share along with some brief notes and, usually, a quote. It’s similar to social...

Good question. I want to talk about why it’s a problem, but first a brief aside about why we’re feeling the spam so strongly. Email has Bayesian spam filters so the hundreds of spam messages you get each day don’t show up in your inbox. Fediverse services such as Mastodon¹ do not have this sort...

/now answers “what are you up to recently?” and you should have one.

How I use my domain in my Mastodon username, settings I recommend for single-user servers, and migrating to a new instance.

The Decree pattern helps developers write single-purpose service objects that have a predictable API contract, are composable, are easily tested, and isolate the core logic of your app.

I enjoy knowing when people read the content, and I don’t get to when it’s via RSS because my server-side visit counter doesn’t tick up in a meaningful way when RSS readers fetch /atom.xml. I’ve recently (concomitant with publishing this) swapped to truncated content in the feed except for...

Mentionable is a gem that provides support for inbound Webmentions and microformats in Rails apps.

Cadet’s log, Stardate 48211.4: My Star Trek Adventures character Eater-of-Grass looks forward to his assignment aboard the USS Rio Grande.

Become familiar with Enumerable to grow as Rubyist and write clearer, more performant code.

Musings on collaboration, adaptability, and learning focused through my hobby of painting miniatures.

We should heed Chesterton’s Fence and be careful to consider why our teammates wrote the code that they did before we look at it and think “there is a better way”.

I’ve been experimenting with a 5 minute standup meeting rather than allowing standups to run long. Scheduling them at 5 minutes before the hour and allowing them to go a little long if necessary has been really effective at keeping the team on track.

RSpec is good, but it’s even better with less of it. We’ll first look through a heavily obfuscated real-world example, learning why parts of RSpec like let, subject, before, shared_examples, and behaves like can make your tests hard to read, difficult to navigate, and more complex. We’ll discuss...

Hide refactoring commits in git-blame by using .git-blame-ignore-revs

We can achieve better object design and smaller interfaces by defining associations in one direction only.

Smaller, simpler classes are easier to reason about than larger, more complex ones. Building low fan-out, high fan-in classes helps in designing simple systems.

Talk to your neighbors, but don’t go into their garages—what is the Law of Demeter, how can we follow it in our code, and when should we make exceptions.

It takes a bit more work to mock a method that has a callback block than one without, but it’s worth it.

Alicia is the silent patient, a successful painter who seemingly killed her loving husband of a happy marriage and tried to commit suicide, and who has been unable or unwilling to speak ever since. Theo Fabre is a psychotherapist who wants to help and understand his patient. To do this, he seeks...

Creating custom shapes in SwiftUI is pretty easy. At a high level, to satisfy the Shape protocol you just need to define path(in rect: CGRect) -> Path. Shape itself conforms to View, so you can even get a preview in XCode of your shape while you build it.

This recipe was originally posted to Serious Eats, but at some point was lost to their redesigns. The original author was Helen Jane.

You could always sign Git commits with a GPG key, but now your SSH key is just as powerful!

Mocktail is a new testing library from the lovely folks at Test Double. It seeks to provide a more modern, less intrusive, and friendlier interface for using test doubles.

CSS clamp() provides a method for setting numerical values with a minimum, maximum, and a calculated value between the two. The syntax is calc([min], [calculated], [max]) and it’s useful for times when you want to scale some value based on the size of the screen by using the vw length unit.

A mostly spoiler-free collection of “elevator pitch” descriptions of D&D 5e’s officially published adventure books.

Magazines, books, and other print layouts sometimes use images that overlap with the text, and have that text wrap around the shape of the image. It can make for an interesting effect, bringing a feeling of motion into a static medium. Done right, the text and image become conceptually closer in...

I’ve moved my Jekyll site into a Rails app, and I’ve done just enough work to have every post render without errors and added just enough style to make things readable. Some of the site still looks pretty bad, and none of it looks good yet. But that’s ok, because my plan is to rebuild and...

Our posts have categories, which I’ve used as a “collection” or “series” of posts that are on related topics. Recently, I’ve been writing up campaign notes for my D&D session as the characters themselves in a category simply called Campaign Logs. I’m also hoping to continue to write this type...

Lirazel prays to Marthammor Duin, thanking him for the safe journey to Phandalin and praising the welcome of the Phandalin people.

Duke Rutledge recalls the final events in the Cragmaw Hideout.

Dionisia records the events so far with the Cragmaw in her spellbook.

As a speaker, you shouldn’t be taking questions on stage after your talk.

Mel writes to his brother in Neverwinter of the party’s journey so far.

Hannah & Caleb’s Austin recommendations

Why is my last name Hearth now?

Class and subclass options for Dungeons & Dragons 5e for all published books, Unearthed Arcana, and the Elemental Evil Players Companion.

When putting text over an image, readability can be a concern. By combining the responsive HTML5 <picture> container with some best practices for image overlays, we can achieve a good result.

I built software to kill people and I gave a talk about it to warn people to think through their choices. Oppenheimer helped design the atomic bomb - was he able to atone?

More a Handy Haversack than a Bag of Holding

Kvothe the Bloodless. Kvothe the Arcane. Kvothe Six-String. Born to a runaway noble and the leader of a troupe of transient Edema Ruh entertainers. Apprentice to a travelling arcanist and tinker. Street urchin in Tarbean, student at the University, Talented musician at the Eolian, Adem-trained...

A review of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E.

Inspiration for all the fantasy work I have done stems directly from… being an avid reader of all science fiction and fantasy literature.

A Use Case of using Observatory by Mozilla to learn about configuring sites safely and securely with examples for the Heroku Static Buildpack.

Race/Ancestry options for Dungeons and Dragons 5e from Elemental Evil Player's Companion, Volo's Guide to Monsters, Player's Handbook, Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.

This is a handout I’ve lovingly researched and prepared for my players in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’ll be starting soon.

Jekyll, the static website generator written in Ruby and popularized by GitHub, is a great candidate for being run on Heroku.

Rails provides its own slug generator, so you may not need another gem.

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.

But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

How does your salary compare to others? Is that job offer fair? Does a candidate have reasonable pay expectations? Take the Salary Social Survey and we’ll find out together!

We’ll visualize the steps for several sorting algorithms not only using pretty visualizations on a slide, but also with people as the objects being sorted. Don’t know what an algorithm is, what performance really means, or what “Big O” means, or what these best-, worst-, and average-case time...

Define a .call() on service objects to stub with Procs.

What do you do when indexes aren’t enough?

Vim commands are terse and arcane, but very expressive. See a complex command broken down by clause.

Take a guided tour through a query plan for a “simple” SQL query.

People with hobbies are generally healthier. They’re also at a lower risk for some mental health issues.

As developers, we often stare at a computer screen all day only to go home and stare at more glowing boxes all night. Having a nontechnical hobby can really help to keep us sharp for our day jobs.

As I live-paint a small model for a tabletop wargame, I will describe some of the techniques I use....

Go’s interface provides a way to abstract away things like your database for testing.

The need to keep your personal information, sensitive or nonsensitive, secure from prying eyes isn’t new, but recent events have brought it back into the public eye.

In this workshop, we’ll build and upload public keys, explore Git commit signing, and learn to sign others’ PGP keys. If we have...

Body weight can be a difficult issue to grapple with. But we’re software engineers—what if we approached it as an engineering problem? Our bodies have inputs (food) and outputs (water and waste). The difference between the two dictates weight changes.

Learn not only how to use PGP, but why each step is important and how to make decisions when interacting with PGP.

Use fragment identifier to display “flash messages” after form submissions to give users closure.

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search <input>.

Thanks to the power of ...

The Constitution of the United States limits Congress from making laws to limit the freedom of speech of United States citizens.

Collect names & addresses from users in a single field, not structured forms.

Filling out a form with Capybara is tedious. Formulaic, makes the process less repetitive and more fun.

Rails is a mixture of design patterns, practices, and magic. In this talk, we’ll explore how Rails embraces ideas from other frameworks and projects.

Active Record was born of Martin Fowler. MVC was the brainchild of Trygve Reenskaug. Rails 3 completely absorbed the Merb project, gaining...

Company chatrooms aid communication, especially across multiple locations; they provide an archive for past conversations for those who were not around; and they can serve to refresh the memory of those who were.

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t always a Vim user.

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search field.

Use Dispatch to open new tmux splits to run tests async.

If you contribute to more than one blog, you may want to have all of your posts show up in a single stream, even if they aren’t hosted on that same site.

An “Iceberg Class” is loosely defined as a class with more private than public methods, but we will be specifically talking about those classes with only one or two public methods (other than an initializer).

While the title element is one of the only required tags in HTML, it is often overlooked by developers and designers alike until the end of the development process.

This is probably the best cocktail concoction I have ever created.

Solution for error crontab: temp file must be edited in place

You may have noticed a recent addition to thoughtbot’s blog posts. We concluded an experiment to add a “Written by [Author Name]” byline and link the author’s name to their Google+ profile.

Four rules for clean and maintainable code from Sandi Metz

I often come across GitHub Pages branches (gh-pages) branches that are simply forks from the master branch of the repository.

You’re already writing decent commit messages. Let’s see if we can level you up to awesome. Other developers, especially you-in-two-weeks and you-from-next-year, will thank you for your forethought and verbosity when they run git blame to see why that conditional is there.

You look at code all day. Make it look nice with Pitch.

You are wrong about a few things, and that is okay.

There is a science and an art to writing an effective README for an open source project.

Besides moving attribute whitelisting to the controller rather than the model, Rails 4’s move to Strong Parameters over attr_accessible provides great documentation about the data with which records are being created.

An Open Letter To the Management of (Generally) Small Companies with Internal Software Teams

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

I loved Google Reader, but Google ended it in favor of Google+