Tracy Atteberry
Not long ago I wrote about my search for a process (as in daemons) management tool to manage webservers, build watch processes, etc. across many different projects. I was still undecided at that point, but have since landed on Pitchfork . It does a bit more than I need and it is well-maintained. See that previous post for a discussion of that and other options that I considered. Having settled on…
I love RSS feeds. I have a reader on my phone ( Feeder ) and one on my laptop ( NetNewsWire ). I find it the perfect way to keep up with my blogroll reading list. Imagine my horror, then, when I discovered that my own blog had the RSS feed turned off. 😱 It took a while to get the feed icon and the inline images to show up properly, but with the help of my AI sidekick we eventually figured it out.…
Does your frontend AI skill give you a site that looks like all the other AI sites? That’s probably because if you don’t give some guidance otherwise, you tend to get the same font (Inter), same gradients, same nest of cards, etc. The AI design slop. So when I needed to re-create a few simple single-page sites recently, I reached for Impeccable . It’s a very nice AI skill to help…
The inertia problem When I start working on a project, I open a terminal and start a few processes. The web server. A background job worker. The asset watcher that recompiles my JavaScript. Maybe a locally-running database service. Each one might get its own terminal tab, and each tab has a command I have to remember, or dig out of a README, or other docs. Since I work across multiple projects in…
AI lets you ship faster than ever. That’s great. But six months later, you’re staring at your own codebase wondering who wrote this. Why is this service doing that? Why did you pick this library over the obvious one? What were you thinking? The problem usually isn’t the code. It’s that AI accelerates the building without capturing the thinking. You evaluate options, make…
Creating a gem that writes your missing tests No new project survives contact with the real world unscathed. We built TestGenAI, ran it on itself, and it worked well. Then we ran it on another codebase, and two things broke immediately. The fixes turned out to just as interesting as the original build. This is a walkthrough of how the tool works and what we learned when we took it outside the…
A few days ago I built a tool called JoyConf: a real-time audience feedback system that lets speakers see emoji reactions floating up in the corner of their presentation while they’re talking. It was a fun, simple idea and I was pretty excited about it. I built it in Elixir and Phoenix LiveView, which was a deliberate choice. I mostly write Ruby these days, but this project felt like a good…
I built a live emoji reaction app for my upcoming talk I have a talk coming up in a few weeks. It got rescheduled once, which gave me extra time to prepare. The presentation itself is finished, so I used that time to build an application that I think will make the talk more fun and engaging for the audience. I wanted to add some live audience interaction. The usual options, Slido, Mentimeter, Poll…
Building MockOpenAI: a weekend MVP story Last weekend I built and published a Ruby gem. From idea to published thing in about four days. Here’s how it went, including the part where I had to reconsider whether I’d built something useful at all. Friday: 20 ideas, one bet I’m between jobs right now. Good position to be in if you like building things, terrible position to be in if…
Documentation search: When your Rails app needs which approach Imagine spending an afternoon watching a developer tear out a perfectly functional search feature. They replace their solid Postgres full-text search with a vector database and RAG pipeline because, well, that’s what you’re supposed to do now, right? The new system is slower, cost them $200 a month in OpenAI API calls, and…