Keith Schacht's Weblog

with_options is some nice syntax sugar in Rails When a series of validations (in an ActiveRecord model) all share the same conditional or when a series of before_actions (in a controller) do, with_options is a nice grouping.

Oat is a Minimal UI library If I were to lean into a new UI library, this would likely be it.

A friend and I built a browser prototype that answers questions about whatever’s on your screen using getDisplayMedia, client-side wake-word detection, and server-side multimodal inference.

I built a demo of a voice AI task manager.

Tests within a ruby's class This is a clever trick for adding tests inside the same file that defines the methods.

Check for test coverage I should consider adding an automated test coverage checker to help with AI coding.

Modern CSS techniques Another great write-up about the 37signals Fizzy app, this one breaks down how to structure CSS for a complex project without using Tailwind.

Useful patterns in Fizzy A great write-up of 10 new patterns in the 37signals Fizzy app which could be applied elsewhere.

Rails Notes I forget about the rails notes command to pull out all the TODO's within a codebase.

Methods on associations I never knew you could include methods inside ActiveRecord associations: ``` class Book has_many :reviews do def featured = where(featured: true).first end end book.reviews.featured ```

SuperClaude [on Rails] I've started to feel Claude Code is a bit superior to Cursor and find myself using it more.

Async meetings I've long heard about the Amazon approach to meetings and have been intrigued.

Here are the key steps I went through to my Android phone to work with iMessage and with my Apple Watch.

Web Components Tutorial A great tutorial on using web components.

`with_defaults` is the same as `reverse_merge` in rails but much better named.

No more pulling down changes to a project and realizing I need to run `bundle install`.

I am seeing more activity around an elegant way to utilize React in Rails.

It's been awhile since I've gone deep on optimizing queries in rails.

A clever CSS-only hack for blurry placeholder images This little bit of code, gives you a nice blurry placeholder with no JS required: <img src="…" style="--lqip:192900">

How to import any JS library without a build system I often come across an NPM module and want to import it into an app I’m building which does not make use of a javascript build.

Updating a rails view component with hotwire This is a good pattern for wrapping a rails view partial with a light class to enable more easily updating them with Hotwire.

You can constrain a variable to be within a range using clamp: 5.clamp(1, 10) # => 5 -3.clamp(1, 10) # => 1 15.clamp(1, 10) # => 10 Tags: Ruby

I've always known that Ruby supports ranges within a string's square brackets.

The couple times I've done API versioning it was with /v1/ or v1.domain.com.

A programmable wireless eink display This is a clever little product: it’s an eink display that is fully programmable and you can wirelessly update.

Dynamic routing to a controller's action If you have a rails form which has multiple submit buttons such as Publish and Unpublish, you can easily route those to corresponding actions within the controller with this clever hack.

Dario from Anthropic is the most articulate and thoughtful person I’ve found on the subject of AI.

Campsite Rails codebase There are not a lot of great open source rails projects to learn from, but lately I’ve seen some notable discussion about this one.

Avo - Rails Admin There are a few different gems for building Rails internal admin dashboards.

YouTube: Death Spiral of Army Ants A phenomenon where army ants follow each other in circles, sometimes until they die — and thus known as an “ant death spiral” — was captured on camera at a university in Venezuela.