Notes on software, building products and whatever else is on my mind.
401(k), Roth, backdoor Roth, 529, HSA, FSA, why dividend funds and investment-style insurance usually lose: the US money system is a wall of acronyms if you didn't grow up with it. These are the notes I wish someone had handed me, with 2026 numbers.
Ten days, 208 commits: a tactics RPG framework that plays Shadow Dragon (25 chapters) and Gaiden (54 chapters) on a phone, with AI-painted art held to a standard that's enforced in code and a $20 budget per title.
Play Fire Emblem Collection (opens in a new tab)My 2013 Battle City clone came back with online co-op over WebRTC, a global leaderboard, and a NIGHTMARE difficulty where TypeSafe's Jev picks each enemy tank's objective every two seconds.
Play FC Tank (opens in a new tab)Every carrier says the new iPhone is "on us", and I couldn't work out which deal was actually cheapest. So I built a calculator, inspired by Edmunds' True Cost to Own, that counts the plan, the phone, the fees and the trade-in you hand over.
Price your phone (opens in a new tab)A half-built deck, a clogged 1958 cast-iron drain and a generator that wouldn't start. Fixing them myself taught me that the habit of opening the hood is a philosophy, at home and at work.
We automated a workflow that was costing us hours every day. It took 90 days. Here are the four decisions that made or broke the project.
Local development has become fragmented across terminals, watchers, linters and test runners. Dashflow is a command line job runner that automates those workflows from one YAML file, with web dashboards and an interactive shell.
Dashflow on GitHub (opens in a new tab)After migrating repositories from Gitlab to Github, and their CI from Gitlab CI to Concourse CI, here are my takeaways on two completely different CI systems.
A walkthrough of modern techniques for building an attractive CLI app, with a concrete example: a command line clock with colors, options, autocompletion and single-binary distribution.
terminal-clock on GitHub (opens in a new tab)A method that unifies one-subsystem and cross-subsystem integration testing with the same components and standards, costing only a portion of traditional methods.
Think twice before adding any complexities to your project. How dropping Babel from two Node.js projects removed the build step without losing the features I relied on.
Performance is always a bottleneck for rails apps. Calls and delegations are db operations under the hood, so it’s better to equip ourselves with some swiss army knife: profiling, caching, better algorithms and GC tuning.
While browsing code these days, reading some wonderful pieces and some awful lines, some thoughts came into my mind.
If you’re like us, having an existing ruby on rails project and want to somehow run it inside a docker container so we can get those great benefits from the Docker ecosystem, this article may help.
In the past a few months, I’ve tried to rebuild the classical FC tank game in CoffeeScript.
Play FC Tank (opens in a new tab)Recent days I just wrote an active record extension to make cache optimization easier for company. I realized it’s a useful tool and publish it as a gem might be a good idea, so I started writing the gem acts_as_method_cacheable.
acts_as_method_cacheable on GitHub (opens in a new tab)