I am a Staff Software Developer working across languages and teams. I write about the technical and cultural challenges of software development.
willow-camp
Features Added * Live markdown preview functionality using “Preview Post” button at the bottom. This is better than the Marksmith “Preview” beside “Write” because it shows the rendered site. * Automatic dark mode detection for Marksmith editor which is better than before but still needs work * Enhanced tag selection using the Choices.
willow-camp
Published on July 20, 2025 I just asked Claude to speed up the slowest test file in willow.camp. post_test.rb was taking over 1 second to execute. For a tiny Ruby app, that’s a long time. Here’s what Claude did. I was not expecting such a
development-environment
I’ve always struggled to maintain clean, useful dotfiles for myself. Somehow, they work amazingly one day, and then I have to do a clean install, and everything is broken. I finally sat down with Claude and fixed (almost) all the mess. Here’s what I came up with. My
organizational culture
In tech, we talk about “Blameless Postmortems.” What does this mean? Why are we talking about blame? I think the phrase “Blameless Postmortem” has a strong connection to git blame, the command we use to find context on what work was done together and who wrote the code. git blame
ai
I have always been a writer. I haven’t kept all my writing, but I’ve always enjoyed it. Many of my recent blog posts are topics that are easily answerable by AI. I’ve asked myself, why write these posts when an AI can already answer these questions? Why
postgres
My first version of willow.camp ran a Postgres instance on the same container as the app. Before going to production, I had to migrate the data from the local Postgres instance to the managed instance. I had a whopping 50-some records in the database. So, of course, could have
postgresql
I asked myself this question while developing willow.camp and decided to use a managed instance before sharing willow.camp with the world. In this post, I’ll explain my thought process and how it changed as I finished off willow.camp’s blogging features. Hatching a New App Once
willow-camp
In my last post I forgot to explain the name “willow.camp.” It’s quite simple. We have a very cute dog named Willow and I thought I’d name this cute blogging service after him and “camp” was a great TLD that made me think of setting up camp
willow-camp
I’ve been working on a side project and am finally ready to share it! My blog, enumerator.dev, is now hosted on my platform called willow.camp. willow.camp started because I wanted a platform that felt like me. I wanted a simple editing interface, the ability to import
rails
Rack::Timeout is a library that monitors long-running requests in a Ruby app and kills them if they take too long. The default configuration in Rack::Timeout is to kill requests that take 15 seconds or longer. Why Do Requests Take A Long Time? The answer here will vary from
ai
I hate to break it to you, but most code is fueled with vibes. How else do you get an idea off the ground?
Friends don't let friends deploy bugs.