Introduction Recently I built a new computer , and with that comes a fresh installation of Ubuntu LTS, which is currently at version 22.04. I now need to replicate my development environment. For Ruby, that means installing chruby for automatically switching Ruby versions between projects, and ruby-install for installing different Ruby versions. These are the tools that I’ve been using for several…
Introduction This past Christmas I realized it’s now been exactly 25 years - 1996 - since my parents got the Christmas present that would change my life forever: a Gateway 2000 home computer. Up to that point in my life I hadn’t given much thought to computers. It wasn’t something that many people in my area had, growing up on a dairy farm in rural northern Wisconsin. Little did I know that…
Introduction Back in mid-2018, I slogged through learning Kubernetes in order to deploy a Rails web app using it, and I spent quite a bit of time turning that knowledge into a series of detailed blog posts . A little while after completing those blog posts, I was going to make an editorial pass to tighten things up when I realized the content would be much better delivered via screencast rather…
I’m adding a new section to my website: reviews of books I’ve read . It’s something I saw on a different blog that I thought was ingenious, so I’m copying the idea. 🕵️ I’m hoping it will help me to read more, and better retain what I read. Or at the very least keep a record of what I thought of a book that I can refer to later. If it turns into more chore than beneficial I may stop doing it. I…
Introduction Recently I’ve been building a Ruby on Rails web app that needs to allow users to create accounts without passwords, and log in just by clicking a link sent to their email. Commonly referred to as “passwordless” login using “magic links.” As an example, it’s how Medium does their sign up and login: The sign up and login pages send emails with magic links that sign you in when clicked:…
Do you post online under your real name and face ( facepost )? Have you ever worried you’ll eventually say something stupid, or have something you said misconstrued, and be attacked by an angry online individual (or worse, mob)? Have you considered the same risks due to saying nothing in the era of “silence is violence?” I certainly have, and I’d like to share some strategies for shrinking the…
Recently on my Twitter I’ve been seeing some buzz about a new email app called HEY . It seems to improve some ergonomics with traditional approaches to email, like moving receipt emails to a “paper trail” area, better screening of new contacts, and some other things. Fundamentally though, it’s still email under the covers. This made me wonder what an evolution of what email actually is would look…
Starting in early August, Amazon seemingly began purging hundreds of listings for firearm accessories from its website that include the terms “AR-15” or “AK-47.” At the moment, many of these products still show up in Google’s search cache , however following the results render Amazon’s 404 page which displays a picture of a random employee’s dog: I first noticed this happening last month when some…
On the death of my family's dairy farm by Abe Voelker Mar 6th, 2019 This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on. As usual I took the opportunity to help my dad and younger brother with barn chores and milk cows. The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4AM and 4PM. I didn’t help out every shift…
Last month I recorded my first ever screencast series, Kubernetes on Rails . It’s a course that teaches Kubernetes by showing step-by-step how to deploy a sample Ruby on Rails application to Google Cloud’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE) (note: although “Rails” is in the title, there’s very little Rails-specific bits in the course 1 ). In addition, since Google Cloud (GCP) is still a bit more exotic than…