What's Up With Mike D
A conversation about multi-tenant database architecture in Rails, covering the journey of implementing separate SQLite databases for Fizzy customers, and the open-sourced Active Record Tenanted gem that simplifies multi-tenancy implementation.
A summary of my open source work from April through December 2025.
A summary of the current state of precompiled native gems in the Ruby ecosystem.
As Rails's SQLite support has improved, it's finally possible to have truly multi-tenant Rails applications - isolated data for each account! - without sacrificing performance or ease of use.
An update on my open source work.
The first of a (hopefully) regular series of updates on my open source work.
In this podcast episode I talk with Chris Oliver and Andrew Mason about Loofah and the Rails HTML sanitizer, SQLite support in Ruby, how I got started in Ruby, and a bit about management vs leadership.
An accessible deep dive into the evolution of Rails to include HTML5-compliant sanitization, which provides better security for Rails applications.
Evan Phoenix and I were interviewed by Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci about our personal journies in Ruby, how we learn, and how we came to work together on Ruby Shield, a security partnership between Shopify and Ruby Central.
Part two, a bit broader look at C extensions in Ruby, including an explanation of why Nokogiri chose to start precompiling native packages.
One afternoon in early 2021, a 14-year-old test in Rails started failing. Nobody understood why. This 12 minute video will amuse and/or annoy you with a mystery that spans decades and tech stacks.
A deep look at the techniques and toolchain used to ship native (precompiled) versions of Nokogiri and other rubygems with C extensions.
How a 500-person organization can stay agile and embrace change. Presented at Code Climate Summit.
In this interview I talk about Cloud Foundry, Pivotal, and a potpourri of other topics.
Our brains are naturally limited. This can be a curse, or it can be a gift, depending on how you look at it.
A talk given to CUNY students and recent grads about the importance of community in shaping a career.
An internal "Core Practice" talk given at Pivotal Labs.
Subversive lessons from two decades spent in enterprisey companies. Presented at Asbury Agile.
The history of a successful OSS project, along with humorous stories and lessons learned. This talk, given multiple times, is presented here in its final version.
Introduction to OSS projects Loofah, Lorax and McBean to modify, compare and transform HTML and XML documents. Presented at NYC.rb.