Robby Russell writes about Ruby on Rails, software maintainability, and the craft of building long-lived applications. Creator of Oh My Zsh.
I was recently a guest on Scaling DevTools , hosted by the gracious Jack Bridger . We talked about how Oh My Zsh went from a messy little config I shared with a few coworkers into one of the more widely used open source developer tools in the world. Which still feels a little absurd, especially when I look back at the original blog post where I announced it and remember how little grand strategy…
I recently joined ShopTalk Show … episode 711 to be exact. Which… now has me thinking I should probably go get myself a Slurpee. A few things we got into… Oh My Zsh started as shared aliases for teammates… and turned into a plugin ecosystem that keeps growing. Ruby on Rails in 2026… scaling isn’t the question anymore. Teams are wrestling with restraint and keeping systems understandable. LLMs and…
Every two years, the team at Planet Argon runs the Rails Developer Survey. And every two years, I go through the same process… a long list of questions, a hard look at how much time we’re asking of respondents, and a lot of cutting. If you’ve filled it out before, thank you. If this is new to you, here’s the short version: it’s an open survey for Rails developers at all experience levels and…
You gave a handful of your devs access to Claude Code Max… and things moved fast. Output went up. Then things started to drift. Not just formatting or naming. Structure. Approach. Assumptions. One developer builds guardrails around it. Another uses it like autocomplete. A third treats it like a thinking partner. Same tool, same codebase… different results. The code starts to reflect how each…
Every design team I’ve worked with has had the same complaint about clients. “They sent over a PowerPoint with mockups.” Eye rolls. Crossed arms. The unspoken accusation: you’re stepping on my domain. I got it. The client would shortcut the process. Fall in love with their own wireframes. Hand the designer a solution instead of a problem. That friction was real. But here’s what nobody said out…
Over the past few months, a few of us at Planet Argon have been experimenting with Claude Code on real client Ruby on Rails projects. Not demos or greenfield apps, but the kind of long-lived codebases where a backtrace can eat forty-five minutes before you even understand the call chain. The part that surprised us is how often some of those debugging sessions now wrap up closer to ten minutes.…
I’ve been running a few experiments to streamline our development workflow, and I keep talking with folks on teams who haven’t been granted the budget or access to this kind of tooling yet. So I’m writing some of these up to help demystify what the experience is actually like. For this one.. I wanted to see if I could take an AppSignal error and go from alert → fix → deploy without leaving the…
One of my priorities this quarter was running a few AI pilot experiments. This was one of them. When I mentioned the project to a teammate, he said, “You should write this up.” So here we are. Others on our team had already been exploring embeddings, vector databases, and RAG. I’d been watching from the sidelines… until it was time to roll up my sleeves and build something myself. The Problem At…
The industry tends to celebrate beginnings. New repositories. Clean architecture diagrams. The excitement of choosing tools before real constraints show up. First commits get attention because they feel like authorship. Most developers, though, don’t spend their careers starting from scratch. They spend them stepping into systems that already exist, already have users, and already have decisions…
I keep hearing the same story in conference hallway tracks. An engineer leans in and tells me their old boss or client still texts them every four to six months with a “quick question.” There’s usually a slight eye roll. They’ve moved on. They’re not being paid anymore. It feels like a boundary issue. Then I ask what the question was. It’s rarely random. It’s about the custom annual report they…
Over the past few months, I’ve been begrudgingly coming around to something I didn’t expect to admit publicly: AI is getting legitimately useful at building software. Not magical. Not autonomous. Not “paste in requirements and press BUILD.” We’re far from that. But the tooling has crossed a threshold where it meaningfully lowers friction in ways I can no longer dismiss. What surprised me most…
The Oh My Zsh core team recently met up in person at GitHub Universe in San Francisco. Getting the maintainers into the same room matters more than most people realize. It strips away the abstractions and forces the conversation back to reality… what’s working, what’s breaking, what’s quietly draining energy, and what’s worth protecting long term. We spent a good amount of time talking about AI.…
The question Sheon Han poses — “Is Ruby a serious programming language?” — says a lot about what someone thinks programming is supposed to feel like. For some folks, if a tool feels good to use… that must mean it isn’t “serious.” Ruby never agreed to that definition. If it did, I missed the memo. If you arrived late, you missed a chapter when the language felt like a quiet rebellion. The community…
Every so often, someone in the Ruby community will ask, “So… what does Planet Argon actually do these days?” Fair question. We’re not a startup factory. We don’t parachute in to build a shiny MVP, disappear, and leave you with a maintenance headache. Most of our work begins after the launch party. We get the call when the freelancer moves on. When the agency shifts its focus. When the last…
We’ve spent the last decade optimizing for scale. How do we handle more traffic? More users? More engineers? The assumptions were baked in: Growth is coming. Prepare accordingly. So we split things apart. We mapped services to teams. We built for the org chart we were about to have. Then 2023 happened. And 2024. And now 2025. Turns out, the future isn’t always bigger. The Question Nobody’s Asking…
I’ve been thinking about what happens when open source organizations hit their breaking point… when funding dries up, relationships fracture, and everyone’s scrambling to make sense of what went wrong. It turns out, the patterns look familiar. The Organic Growth Problem Open source projects rarely start with governance documents. They start with people solving problems. Infrastructure gets…
As the opening keynote on Day 2 of Rails World 2025 , I had the chance to host a panel with three people who’ve been shaping the direction of both Ruby and Rails from deep within the internals. Aaron Patterson ( @tenderlove ) Hiroshi Shibata ( @hsbt ) Jean Boussier ( @byroot ) We covered a lot in an hour: What they’ve been working on behind the scenes Which areas of Ruby and Rails could use more…
I’ve been part of the Ruby on Rails ecosystem for over two decades. I’ve watched teams adopt Rails with wild enthusiasm… evolve their systems… struggle through growing pains… and eventually find themselves in an uncomfortable position; debating whether to abandon the tools that once brought them so much joy. I don’t think that’s necessary… or even wise. But I do think it’s understandable. After…
Caching in Rails is like duct tape. Sometimes it saves the day. Sometimes it just makes a sticky mess you’ll regret later. Nowhere is this more true than in data-heavy apps… like a custom CRM analytics tool that glues together a few systems. You know the type: dashboards full of metrics, funnel charts, KPIs, and reports that customers swear they need “real-time.” And that’s where the caching…
(or: How I’m Learning to Step Back So We Can Move Forward) Here’s a pattern I’ve been contributing to more than I’d like to admit: Someone on the team proposes a new internal tool. There’s a clear need. There’s momentum. Conversations start about how we’ll build it… what tools we’ll use… where it’ll live… whether it might become client-facing someday. It hasn’t been built yet, but we’re already…
If you didn’t make it to RailsConf this year…or couldn’t make it to my talk…I’ve got good news: the full video is now live. 🎥 Watch it here Preparing for this talk was one of the most nostalgic (and sometimes absurd) research dives I’ve done in years. I pitched The Features We Loved, Lost, and Laughed At thinking it would be easy to uncover a long list of removed or weird Rails features to poke…
Ruby on Rails is often celebrated for how quickly it lets small teams build and ship web applications. I’d go further: it’s the best tool for that job. Rails gives solo developers a powerful framework to bring an idea to life—whether it’s a new business venture or a behind-the-scenes app to help a company modernize internal workflows. You don’t need a massive team. In many cases, you don’t even…
Today marks the launch of On Rails , a new podcast produced by the Rails Foundation and hosted by yours truly. We’ve recorded the first batch of episodes, and Episode 1 is out now: Rosa Gutiérrez on Solid Queue . The show dives into technical decision-making in the Ruby on Rails world. Not the shiny trend of the week… but the real conversations teams are having about how to scale, what trade-offs…
Drowning in technical debt? It doesn’t have to be this way. Back in September at Rails World 2024, I shared what I’ve learned from helping teams tack their way out of trouble—less theory, more battle-tested strategies. Lessons from Planet Argon’s clients, Maintainable.fm guests, and real-world Rails teams. Have 25 minutes? Watch it here: Your future self (and your app) will thank you. More of my…
As a consultant, I’ve looked over a shitload (how many? probably ~150-200) over the last 12 1/2 years in the Ruby on Rails community. I haven’t worked on most of them, but I do get invited to look over, review, audit, and provide feedback on a lot of those. Over on the Planet Argon blog I’ve shared my quick hit list of a few initial things that I look for when looking over an existing code base.…
A few months ago, I wrote an article on Medium about my experience of starting Oh My Zsh . Thought I’d share it for the few lingering readers over here, too. d’Oh My Zsh: How I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project
The 2016 Rails Hosting community survey results are in. One of the numbers that I’m tickled with joy about? 84% of Rails developers said they’d prefer to use PostgreSQL . We won! Check out all the survey results at http://rails-hosting.com/
If you’ve not taken the 2016 Rails hosting survey, please do so at http://rails-hosting.com/
Tom Stuart posted up an excellent article on Automatic Differentiation in Ruby with links to his talk slides and video.
David was kind enough to put together a demonstration of how to take advantage of Action Cable in Rails 5. In the video he puts together a small chat application.
Yesterday, I found out that Ezra Zygmuntowicz had passed away. Ezra and I first met in the #Caboose family. The first time we got to spend time together, in person, was at RailsConf 2006. (photo credit: Jarkko Laine) A few weeks later, he emailed me to ask about getting a job here at Planet Argon. We couldn’t afford him so he continued to pursue other paths… and a month later was helping found…
Attention all Ruby on Rails Developers… you have six days to complete the 2014 Rails Hosting Survey . All of the results will be shared with the community. Consider this your civic duty of the day. :-) http://rails-hosting.com
Recently, I found reading an article by Paul Venezia titled, Fatal abstraction: A bottom-up view of high-level languages , where—if you read between the lines—you can see that Paul just found himself waking up from a coma and it’s no longer 2004. “I may have questioned Perl’s future now and then, and Perl certainly doesn’t have the presence it once enjoyed, but the strength of Perl has always been…
Hello! It’s been two years since Planet Argon last asked the Ruby on Rails community how they were deploying and hosting their applications and we thought it was time to checkin with people. Until April 30th, you can take the survey here .
It was a long time coming… but we finally got a web page designed and deployed for Oh My Zsh . Check it out! (and tell your friends to ditch bash)
Over on the Planet Argon blog, you can read an enlightening interview with two of our Jr. Ruby on Rails developers. Both of them made a career change in their 30s and went through a coding academy here in Portland, Oregon. Check it out…
We’re all excited about the prospect of a new code editor ( Atom Editor ). We all love what Github has produced so far and our expectations for anything new are going to be quite high. Do we know exactly what it’ll be yet? Not quite. We have some hints… but until it’s released… we’ll continue to speculate . While I am not one to make predictions—I do have a few theories about what Atom will not do…
funny how Twitter warned me that a bunch of my friends at GitHub are all a sudden interested in https://t.co/cb52btuPZe — Matt Aimonetti (@mattetti) February 26, 2014 …which leads us to Initial sources suggest that will be one of the biggest app releases of the year. It’ll be loved by many. Hated by some. For more details… visit Atom.io or Atom Beta Dear \@ohmyzsh users… we are ready! ;-) Updates…
It’s been an odd day. The sort of day where you really don’t know what to say. The only thing you can manage to get out is, “Sigh. I’m going to miss him.” Jim Weirich was building interesting stuff with Ruby several years before I was introduced to it. Tools that most of us have taken for granted. Tools that were just there. Before Jim came along… they didn’t exist. Back in the early Ruby on Rails…
We’ve had a number of clients in New York over the years. After a recent trip this last fall to visit clients and attend “Cultivate”:, we decided that we should spend more of our time in the city. In 2014, we’re looking to expand our client base there. If you’re in the NYC area and are looking for an agency that has great Ruby on Rails developers… get in touch .
Earlier today, I noticed that we now have over 500 developers from around the globe who I have accepted pull-requests from[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1 .footnote-ref role=”doc-noteref”}. That is so fantastic. Thanks to each and every one of you who has helped make this project so wonderful for others. :-) ::: {#fn1} This number could be a lot higher if I spent more than a hour or two a week on this, but I’m…
Recently, I found myself re-installing everything from Homebrew and began to notice that MySQL was consuming nearly half a gig of memory. Given that I don’t do too much with MySQL on a regular basis, I opted to override a handful of default configuration options to reduce the memory footprint. As you can see, a fresh MySQL install via homebrew was consuming over 400mb of memory. Here is how I…
Hey all, It’s been a while (most of my blogging is over on the Planet Argon blog ..). but I’m hoping to have some technical-related posts coming in the near future. If you’ll be at LessConf in Florida this week, I’ll be there. Do I owe you a drink? Also, if you’re coming to visit Portland for RailsConf 2013 and will arrive the weekend before, you should join us on a hike . If you can’t make it, be…
A few months ago we invited the Ruby on Rails community to participate in our hosting survey. We’ve since published the results and created an infographic . To learn more, check out the Rails Hosting site.
It’s been several years since I released GoogleAnalyticsProxy , which allows our team to test their GA event/click/view tracking during the development phases of our project. Today, I pushed a quick update to it with a minified version of the JavaScript so that there is a smaller footprint. For more information on how we use it, read my older post, Tracking Google Analytics events in development…
You can follow along with some of my writing at the following sites: Planet Argon on Facebook Planet Argon on twitter Planet Argon blog
Just a short and sweet little tip. Several months ago we moved one of our clients over to Akamai’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). Ww were previously using a combination of Amazon S3 and CloudFront with some benefits, but we were finding several key areas of the world were not s covered by Amazon (yet) for asset delivery. Along with that, we really wanted to take advantage of the CDN for more of…
You might recall that back in 2009, we surveyed the Ruby on Rails community to gauge how people were deploying and hosting their applications. It’s been over three years, so we’ve decided to run it again…. I know… we’re crazy like that! So… without further ado… we present the 2012 Rails Hosting Survey . We’ll be collecting responses for a month, so be sure to put it on your todo list.
Our team at Planet Argon just released a white paper on this topic. I’d like to invite you to check it out .
Hello all! I’ve been so busy this year travelling (for pleasure and work) and helping grow the company that I’ve not had much to say here. Expect some posts soon! In the meantime, if you’re looking for a new challenge… Planet Argon is seeking a few more Ruby on Rails developers. Interested? get in touch .