Martin Brennan

I’ve contributed a couple of articles recently to the Discourse blog: January 2026 - AI can code, but it doesn’t care about quality This along with my article My AI appetites are already feeling slightly outdated in such a fast-changing field, but I am st…

I’d say my overall attitude to using AI for software engineering is still in the “cautious” phase (it gives me the ick when people say bullish and bearish), but more and more I am integrating it into my day-to-day work and responsibilities at Discourse.

It has been several years since I wrote a post on this blog.

I doubt this is still relevant in 2025.

In 2025 this is likely irrelevant, leaving it up for historical curiosity only.

In 2025 I doubt this is helpful, leaving it up as a historical curiosity.

I meant to make a post about this when I started, but I have now been working at Discourse as a Software Engineer for six weeks!

The CSV library in the Ruby stdlib is a really great and easy to use one, and I’ve often used it for data migrations and imports.

Since 2019 a few things have changed: Rails’ UJS stack may no longer use jQuery or $.rails, so this code may break or not even apply.

Prawn is an excellent PDF generation library for ruby, and we use it for all our PDF needs at work (Webbernet at time of writing).