Michael Toppa's blog
ℹ️ See my write-plan and implement-plan skills. The pre-AI coding era: BDUF (big design up front) vs iterative planning I spent the first 10 years or so of my career (going back to the 90s here, folks) in the Waterfall/BDUF era: long meetings discussing endless hypothetical scenarios, big planning documents covering months of work, missed […]
ℹ️ See my ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English) output style for Claude Code This post was originally going to be about AI-assisted planning, but if you’re a Claude Code user, you may be experiencing the same frustration I have recently with Opus 5: it’s often incomprensible. Others have been frustrated also. Matt Pocock posted the other […]
This is the first post in a series on coding with AI. It’s inspired by the talk I gave at RubyConf last week: AI-assisted coding: practical lessons from small startups to legacy codebases. Here are the presentation slides. Video should be available in a week or two. Typically the first step in my Claude Code […]
I drafted this post after RailsConf in 2018, and very belatedly realized I never published it. So I’m finally getting around to it 😉. Reviewing it now, 8 years later, I’m pleasantly surprised at how relevant most of the talks still are. Below are my favorite talks that I attended at RailsConf 2018. Since there […]
let can enhance readability when used sparingly (1, 2, or maybe 3 declarations) in any given example group, but that can quickly degrade with overuse. — RSpec Official Documentation Motivation I’ve been using Rspec since 2012 and in all this time I’ve never had a really clear picture of how to best use let. I […]
The problem File this under small problems that take more time than they should to solve, and I couldn’t find an answer with a web search. Let’s use a simple example. If you have text like this in your translation file (e.g. en.yml): users: new: header: "Let's go!" And then show it in a view […]
Hello world! It’s time for my first post in over 4 years. I recently set up a new Rails 7 project with Rspec and looked online for tips, as one does. I’ve set up many Rails projects before, but not yet with Rails 7, and it’s been a while. The top result in Google for […]
My father passed away on May 10 last year, after a short and unexpected battle with cancer (aside from some back pain, he was doing fine just a few weeks earlier). I wrote his obituary the next day. There was a short graveside committal service, where I also had the opportunity to say a few […]
This is my first post about Magic: The Gathering, which I’ve been playing for years. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I highly recommend this New Yorker article about the history and culture of the game or if you prefer audio, this episode of Planet Money from NPR, about how the game […]
In 1995 I photocopied this ad from a 1966 issue of Time magazine. I was in grad school doing some research on the Vietnam war, and couldn’t help but notice it. It’s almost as over the top as the old Saturday Night Live fake ad for speed. I thought I lost the photocopy years ago, […]