Max Chernyak

Demo Ringbinder is a small, simple CLI tool that lets me do this: > docs "there was a picture with a few dragons of different colors/sizes/shapes, find it" Found it: /Users/max/Documents/Unsorted Photos/2024_11_03_12_07_23.jpg It shows “six colorful w…

This is gonna sound bitter, but hey.

In 2021 I wrote an article encouraging people not to build general purpose APIs for their own front-ends.

There’s no denying that AI is getting very capable, but one thing keeps bothering me: what happens if something goes wrong?

Some API vendors give you an API doc in a giant custom-edited PDF file.

Big (or “Long Term”) refactors are hard to pull off in a busy company.

I originally wrote this list as a part of Writing Maintainable Code is a Communication Skill, then made a tweet.

In Ruby you can kinda pretend that you have type enforcement at runtime, because Ruby is very flexible.

I’ve explored DHH’s way of writing Rails applications.

The term “premature optimization” is often misused.

Every ruby enumerator supports count.

Writing maintainable code is easy.

Code Reviews are First-Class Citizens Code reviews are an integral part of our daily work as engineers.

Update 2025-12-11: There is now a follow up article (4 years later).

The other day I was listening to this Bikeshed podcast episode, where the hosts were discussing when is it a good idea to memoize values using ||= ruby idiom.

Using docker in development can be very convenient, but running your actual app (you know, the one you’re coding) in docker introduces various headaches.

Non Rails-specific Gem elasticsearch-transport Provides a bare-bones HTTP client that doesn’t have any Elasticsearch-specific api methods, but knows how to discover and connect to multiple servers, rotate connections, and log things. readme: elastic/elast…

I started porting my setup from Chef to Ansible a few weeks ago.

chmod [a]bcd bit scope description a sticky:1, setgid:2, setuid:4 (optional, default: 0) b owner x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7 c group x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7 d everyone x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7 Note: only file/dir owner can chmod

Many years ago there was a Rails app.

If you add a dir directly under app/ Do nothing.

Imagine writing an online shop with different types of products.