Articles about programming, learning, code, books, and teams
After a near-disaster, the agent powering Google Antigravity said something that surprised me. I asked it for more details, and eventually the agent, Claude Opus 4.5 (Thinking) offered to write this Power User Guide. I present it here with no validation or editing, just in case it has any merit. (Does it? I don t know!) Expand the first block to see the exact markdown it wrote to disk: Expand the…
Ruby got a new website for its 30th birthday. This upset a lot of folks, for one simple reason. I hope this quote from Austin Kleon helps you to Keep Going. The post Useful Work Produced by People We Find Reprehensible first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
I was vibe coding with Antigravity tonight, and I broke it in the most bizarre way. With the repo at this commit and with a clean working tree, I gave Gemini 3 Pro (High) this prompt: Check out my git tags. Check out my git log! Ope, check out my @CHANGELOG.md And then write it. For a few moments it seemed to chug along just fine, building a coherent Chain of Thought. Then it got weirder, and…
I just published a new gem: ratatui_ruby, which offers Ratatui bindings for Ruby. It allows you to cook up Terminal User Interfaces in Ruby. I expect to write more about it in the coming days. Until then, check out the repo, the documentation, the examples, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, and the ruby gem! The post Ratatui Bindings for Ruby first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
With Ruby 4 set to release on Christmas Day and available in preview now, the Pragmatic Bookshelf just made a huge announcement. The sixth edition of The PickAxe Book, Programming Ruby, is now available to buy as a beta book! The final version is expected in March 2026. Programming Ruby 4 by Noel Rappin with Dave Thomas The post Programming Ruby 4 (The 6th Edition of the Pickaxe Book) Available…
Stephen Margheim (fractaledmind) wrote Affordances: The Missing Layer in Frontend Architecture this month. This quick post is my reply to his great article. I hear the objection already: “Isn’t this just… semantic CSS classes? We tried that.” You’re right that we tried it. But “it didn’t work” deserves unpacking. I was indeed objecting that in my mind. But I was not thinking, it didn t work. I was…
My Reply I like this a lot. It makes me want to go even harder: You could do this a number of ways (TMTOWTDI) Hard-code the methods Use method_missing Use Metaprogramming The post Re: More Fluent Method Signatures in Ruby first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
I am not a graphic designer or a musician. My wife, though, graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Music. She also has a bookcase full of graphic design, interaction design, and user experience design books I have largely ignored. She may not be surprised by what I learned today, but I was. Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised, too. Music-Based Type Scales When choosing font sizes for…
Chirag Mehta made a really great tool. Pick a color or paste a hex code, and it gives you the nearest descriptive name for that color. For example on this site I use: Name That Color by Chirag Mehta The post This Great Tool Helps You Name Any Hex Color first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
This is article is the first installment in the Workflow Patterns for AI-Assisted Development series. To get notified when a new article is published, subscribe for free via email or RSS. Domain Language Mining Discover jargon from an unfamiliar field using LLMs to help you write better software. Context You are creating software to solve a problem. You are not the ideal customer for your…
When 37Signals launched Writebook in 2024, it was under their ONCE License Agreement. Notably, that license does not include the rights to publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, source code or products derived from it. If you visit once.com/writebook today, you ll see these in the FAQs: However, the software license “does not include the rights to publish, distribute,…
For over a decade, Humble Bundle has offered DRM-free media for a great price, while also supporting charity. Even years later, I can t get their jingle out of my head: Sadly, this is no longer true. I love software books, and Humble Bundle has done a great job negotiating with technology publishers to offer great bundles. DRM-free is how they started. Even now, these DRM-free bundles are for…
I clicked a link from a 2-year-old Hacker News thread, and Nielsen Norman Group served up a 404 page. On that 404 page, NN/G served up an educational message for visitors who arrive from ChatGPT, Claude, or another LLM: (Did an AI chat send you here? They sometimes get URLs wrong or hallucinate nonexistent NN/G articles.) Is this a new best practice for 404 page design? The post A New Best…
With the publication of Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, Christopher Alexander s pattern language format caught fire in software engineering. Three decades later, industry authors still publish book after book after book enumerating pattern languages. Even outside of software, the Alexandrian form continues to spread. From pedagogy to presentations, from activism even back to architecture,…
When I was a younger developer, I thought I knew how to make code better by, as the kids would say today, following vibes. Much later, a coworker gave me a copy of Martin Fowler s Refactoring. I regret how long I put off reading it. Even later, I read Sandi Metz s 99 Bottles of OOP and learned just how safe refactoring could be. Fearless refactoring is a skill that must be learned, and it is…
As my wife and I were listening to Uncle Bob s book on professionalism in software, this line surprised me. Maybe it s just because I don t understand tests as well as I d like, but I had to stop and take note. He clarified exactly what he meant, too: The post Acceptance Tests and Unit Tests as Documents First, Tests Second first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
I ve been disconnected from the junior and hiring scene since I stepped back into an individual contributor role. Recently, though, a friend of mine decided they wanted to get into the field. I poked my head up and looked around, and I was shocked at what I found. This talk is a great overview of what s different today compared to six years ago, and what can be done about it. Erin Pintozzi –…
I ve been making SPAs for over a decade, but I ve always held the opinion that it s only the right tool for web apps, not websites. I m glad to finally see some evidence in support of this viewpoint! The post Re: One Soft Navigation per Page Load first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
I haven t written PHP for over a decade. I haven t even touched it since 2017. But in the spirit of legitimate peripheral participation, I asked a couple of LLMs to write a WordPress plugin for this blog. Within 15 minutes, I had a proof of concept from ChatGPT. Next, I got Claude to generate an even better version in one shot. I iterated to add a feature and said, Hey! It compiles! Ship it! It…
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025 This is a fantastic deep-dive into the history of object-oriented programming with 50+ years of primary sources! Even though I make information systems, not games, I really enjoyed Casey Muratori s talk. The post The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
was a relative newbie to both agile and lean when I first met Mary and Tom Poppendieck at an Agile Conference in Salt Lake… Continue ReadingAutomated Tests as Waste vs. Needed The post Automated Tests as Waste vs. Needed first appeared on Kerrick Long (blog) .
I haven t published since April because I ve been afraid. I also avoided social media, news aggregators, and discussion forums for months. I m done letting fear stop me. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I ve avoided admitting on this blog. First, why am I admitting these things now? I realized I am not the only working software developer missing crucial skills. My…
You should ship software that does nothing. Absolutely nothing. I m not being cheeky about this. I have no hidden meaning. The very first thing you should deliver when you start a new web application is absolutely nothing. Many people will tell you to ship a minimum viable product. Others say to ship a prototype to get feedback. Not me. I think you should ship a blank page to your production…
It’s been a while since I’ve had a crisis of confidence. But tonight, I read Steve Yegge’s recent post, “Revenge of the Junior Developer.” In it, he lays out a vision of a future—only two years away—in which nobody writes code anymore. I felt a cocktail of anger, fear, worry, and disbelief. Then, I thought through the implications, and came up with a plan of action: Kerrick’s Wager. First, a bit…
I’ve been paid to write web applications for over a decade, but my only exposure to ASP.NET has been as an API consumer on the front-end, and I ve never touched Blazor. That’s changing—I’m learning how to be a full-stack developer. There are almost too many books about the .NET platform, so I had to choose a few to focus on. I started by reading the front matter: the title, cover, foreword,…
I ve been writing code for money for 17 years, but I ve never used C# or any other .NET language. That s changing—I m learning how to be a full-stack developer. There are almost too many books about the platform, so I had to choose a few to focus on. I started by reading the front matter: the title, cover, foreword, preface or introduction, and table of contents of 26 different books. This was…
Fizz Buzz, the children s game turned coding interview question, requires little more than basic programming literacy to solve. But it has just enough complexity that it can also be used to illustrate some important tenets of object-oriented design through refactoring. The premise of the game is to count up from one, but replace the number with Fizz if it s divisible by three, Buzz if it s…
When I learned lean software development, I abandoned year-long planning at work and at home. This year, I broke my rule. I made a New Year s resolution. I decided to broaden my skills so I could ship a full-stack enterprise web app completely on my own. No back-end developers, no product managers, no UI designers, and no vibe coding. Since I wrote Ruby years ago and Rails is having a Renaissance…
I’ve been programming for over two decades, and I can’t make a full-stack enterprise web application. The first lines of code I wrote were in GW-BASIC. When I was in eighth grade, I enrolled in a typing class. Students who finished their typing practice before class ended were given an extra credit opportunity: copying program source code. It was a fantastic test of applied accuracy, and I gladly…