Andy Croll

When you’re building views in Rails, you often need to apply CSS classes conditionally.

When you need to build HTML outside of a template, it’s tempting to concatenate strings and call html_safe on the result.

To deal with secrets and credential handling most Rails apps have ended up with a hotchpotch of ENV.fetch calls and credentials.dig lookups throughout the codebase, depending on where each secret lives.

English has plenty of irregular plurals.

Some English words don’t have a separate plural form.

A lot of Rails’s naming magic comes from its clever use of inflections. user.rb defines the User class, backed by the users table, managed by UsersController, accessible at the /users/ routes.

When multiple validations share the same if: condition, or multiple callbacks share the same only: constraint, you end up repeating yourself. with_options groups them together.

Rails models default to using their ID in URLs: /articles/42.

You’ve probably seen Rails.env.production?

When checking if a value exists within a collection, Ruby’s include?

Tailwind CSS 4 changed how configuration works.

Ruby 4.0 landed during Christmas 2025 with a bunch of new features.

House moves, robot armies, and scratching itches.

Off I went to Amsterdam via—so incredibly civilized—Eurostar from St Pancras wearing my favourite Made the Scene t-shirt.

Rails 8.0 added except_on as an option to validations.