Stephen Margheim

If you didn't see yesterday, I'm partnering with @aarondfrancis and @steve_tenuto to produce an in-depth video course on building with Rails + SQLite. "High Leverage Rails" is coming in February and I couldn't be more excited!

@brandur Dang. Wild rides. But pretty cool. DM when you hit AGI!

2x acquisitions in <365 days. Crazy, man. x.com/StainlessAPI/s…

@IanLandsman My dad always says, “There’s a reason average is average.”

We have these incredible tools for creating cover letters, resumes, and websites that convey who you are and all three phases of the game for most people are WORSE than ever 😅 (I'm still reeling from this afternoons hiring session)

@juliknl @emilkowalski

Grabbed @emilkowalski 's course and it looks fabulous, but I just can't force myself over the hump of being forced to write motion.dev and React just to see examples of something. I've been riding animation curves by hand for 8 years gawddammit, I know exactly how this shit works. I don't want to have to use a non-Web-native tech that I hate just to understand concepts... may end up writing a skill that de-Reactifies every single interactive example there just to shake off the feeling...

@jorgemanru I would recommend you check out Soloterm by @aarondfrancis. Linux support is coming soon, but the approach to tooling I think is a better fit and more solid foundation soloterm.com

I’m pretty happy with tmux as the backbone of my agent workflow, but I keep hearing great things about Conductor (Mac-only). What am I missing on Linux?

@ihtesham2005 This has @aarondfrancis written all over it

A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work. His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. He invented error-correcting codes that made modern computing possible. And he spent 30 years at Bell Labs sitting in a cafeteria at lunch watching which scientists became legendary and which ones faded into nothing. In March 1986, he walked into a Bellcore auditorium in front of 200 researchers and told them exactly what he had seen. Here's the framework that has been quoted by every serious scientist for the last 40 years. His opening line landed like a punch. He said most scientists he worked with at Bell Labs were just as smart as the Nobel Prize winners. Just as hardworking. Just as credentialed. And yet at the end of a 40-year career, one group had changed entire fields and the other group was forgotten by the time they retired. He wanted to know what the difference actually was. And he said it wasn't luck. It wasn't IQ. It was a specific set of habits that almost nobody is willing to follow. The first habit was the one that hurts the most to hear. He said most scientists deliberately avoid the most important problem in their field because the odds of failure are too high. They pick a safe adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it, and move on. And because they never swing at the hard problem, they never hit it. He said if you do not work on an important problem, it is unlikely you will do important work. That is not a motivational line. That is a logical one. The second habit was about doors. Literal doors. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over a career. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly. They also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems the closed-door scientists did not even know existed. The third habit was inversion. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he wanted, Hamming sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he flipped the question. Instead of asking for programmers to write the programs, he asked why machines could not write the programs themselves. That single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. He said the pattern repeats everywhere. What looks like a defect, if you flip it correctly, becomes the exact thing that pushes you ahead of everyone else. The fourth habit was the one that hit me the hardest. He said knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10 percent harder than you does not produce 10 percent more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add. It multiplies. And it compounds silently for years before anyone notices. He finished the lecture with a line I have never been able to shake. He said Pasteur's famous quote is right. Luck favors the prepared mind. But he meant it literally. You don't hope for luck. You engineer the conditions where luck can land on you. Open doors. Important problems. Inverted questions. Compounded hours. Those are not traits. Those are choices you make every single day. The transcript has been sitting on the University of Virginia's computer science website for almost 30 years. The video is free on YouTube. Stripe Press reprinted the full lectures as a book in 2020 and Bret Victor wrote the foreword. Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before. He was 82. The lecture that explains why some careers become legendary and others disappear is still free. Most people who could benefit from it will never open it.

Make the API call in an auto-retrying background job. Before you make the POST persist your intent to make the POST. After you get a response, persist that a response came. If the job retries, check if you already got a response; if so, skip. If not, check if you already intended to POST; if so, first check if the resource exists with a GET. This way, you only check with GET on a retry, saving the cost on first runs, which should succeed a vast majority of the time.

Here’s a fun distributed transactions problem You call an API, it throws a 500 error but successfully does the thing anyway. It is super important that the thing doesn’t happen twice Design a system that handles this

@schwad_rb @Shopify @zardotapp Welcome! Excited to work together

Five years at @Shopify 🛍️ Slinging code on the Ruby and Rails Infrastructure Team 💪 My life’s mission to make the world a better place now takes me to @zardotapp LFG 🚀

@strzibnyj Windows 😁

What would you install first on Macbook Pro 14" M4 Max?

@jnunemaker Not to be that guy, but you should definitely check out Literal: literal.fun/docs/

Dry-rb has some crazy syntax but I love how you can enforce types and provide failures for API endpoints. I use it heavy in flipper cloud's telemetry and starting to in other app API endpoints.

@bradgessler Apartment doesn’t integrate deeply enough with Rails. I expect footguns galore. Active storage, ActionText, GlobalID, ActiveJob Serializers, etc. the best thing about Tenanted is the deep integration with every part of Raiks

In a position where I might be able to commit some serious resources to this project and move it forward if it makes sense. The other option being considered is the road-more-traveled use of the apartment gem. Currently leaning in that direction.

Has anybody successfully deployed Tenanted into production for Postgres databases? How did it work for you? What problems did it solve? What problems did it introduce? github.com/basecamp/activ…

@strzibnyj My guess is AppSignal, given European base with recent growth and expansion

I am joining a company which is a contributing member of the Rails Foundation, take a guess 🤔

@hobdaydesign @raffichill It starts to appear right as you hit the bottom of the page scrolling down, so it starts as a visual signal of where you are going and morphs as you continue going down showing you that you will now go back

@raffichill I don’t understand the concept behind it starting as a downwards-facing chevron. Except that it allows for a rotate animation.

Mobile UX innovation of the year so far

@coorasse Joel Drapper and I have been building this for a while, but haven’t gotten it over the top and out the door. Good motivation here tho!

Is there a PaaS out there where I can just use SQLite and be 100% sure that it is backed up properly?

@render Trying to create an account and not receiving the email. Is it because my email domain is .xyz? Email account definitely works, and I need the verification email to finish setup and deploy my apps.

I get to meet the one, the only, the Takesman @IanLandsman tonight in Amsterdam. Pretty excited, won’t lie

@AlmondVoice Hell yeah!

Introducing ~vibe mode~: Speak your prompts and auto-send them without needed to manually press enter. It's amazing if you have multiple Claude / Codex sessions open at the same time. Enjoy :)

@almonk @deepfates Lovely. Purchased!

@deepfates Working on it replay.software/echo

has anybody produced a good terminal interface for the phone? obviously there's termux but it's basically the worst app you will ever use and its power is the only thing keeping it afloat. replit did a good stab at this with the d-pad nub and so on but afaik not open source?

@AlmondVoice Do you mean #1? Here's a screenshot. On a related note, the key mentioned when I hover over it is incorrect.

@fractaledmind Hey Stephen thanks for the love! We're rolling out #2 and #3 in an hour Could you send a screenshot about #2? Sounds like a bug

@AlmondVoice Loving the app thus far! A few feature requests: 1. a way to hide the "Keep holding, speak, then release" text 2. a setting to auto-submit the text in certain apps/contexts, like Claude Code 3. ability to hide the app from the dock, maybe move it to menubar

@helenhousandi We won't go back as things used to be, but we will re-embrace richer classes that interoperate with utilities naturally and smoothly. I call such classes "affordance classes" and I see similar sentiment shifts in this direction as well. fractaledmind.com/2025/12/01/ui-…

How much longer until we fully abandon CSS utility classes and go back to semantic classes, I see we're already halfway around the bend so at this point I'm just waiting to live to see if I was right all along