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While reviewing dozens of PRs from ericproulx optimizing Grape’s internals recently, I noticed that the bare raise ArgumentError, "..." calls scattered across the codebase were inconsistent: some messages were capitalized, some ended in a period, most were

distance_of_time_in_words is a small Ruby gem that turns two Time objects into a human-readable string like “3 days and 4 hours”.

My previous post walked through four bugs in ruby-enum, a gem I maintain, all stemming from the fact that class-level instance variables aren’t inherited by subclasses.

The ruby-enum gem is a small library I maintain that adds enum-like behavior to a class via include Ruby::Enum and define :KEY, value.

The slack-ruby-client library, an open source Ruby gem I maintain, runs a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow that regenerates code from Slack’s API definitions and opens a pull request with the diff.

AI-first Engineering is now the operating default in many organizations, including mine.

In April 2025 I wrote Apologizing for My Obsessiveness Over Punctuation, a post about my various organizational compulsions.

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team built expertise with the years: new team members joined, contributed small bug fixes, then were given more ambitious tasks over time as they became more comfortable in a codebase, to ultimately become

Yesterday I described AI-generated code as “plausible-looking, locally coherent, globally wrong.”

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team of 8-10 people might have been lucky to have one or two “10x engineers”, or “workhorses”, the kind of engineer that both keeps project quality and feature velocity high.

In today’s shocker, Meta is to “create a new applied AI engineering organization aiming for an ultra-flat structure of up to 50 employees to one manager”.

Dries Buytaert recently wrote about The Third Audience.

I’ve written and talked extensively about Hypermedia APIs for about a decade.

One of the negative side effects of having any top-down command structure is that every additional layer risks introducing a new level of bureaucracy, which then actively subtracts value.

The most abused principle in dysfunctional organizations is “Disagree and Commit”.

A famous example where telling Engineers what to do backfired was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

Let’s get Claude Code to connect to Google Sheets.

One of my colleagues wrote a pretty awesome tool called claude-swarm that orchestrates multiple Claude Code instances as a collaborative AI development team.

Six months ago I failed a basic coding interview at a FAANG.

There’s much written about becoming a first time Engineering Manager (I recommend Camille’s book), but little about the second time.