Editor’s note (2026): This is a strongly worded 2010 opinion, not hiring or accessibility guidance. Modern web work includes both deep specializations and generalist roles; basic HTML and CSS syntax can be approachable, while production UI work also carries substantial accessibility and standards obligations. Current …
The frontend backend debacle
Tomorrow is the first day of How to web 2010, this should be fun
Archive note (2026): The conference URL and discussion refer to the 2010 event. HTML5 was unfinished then; W3C published HTML5 as a Recommendation in 2014, and HTML is now maintained as a Living Standard by WHATWG. Current context How to Web · HTML Living Standard Just got to Bucharest, tomorrow I’ll be at How to Web 2010 …
Programatica 2010 after thoughts
Editor’s note (2026): This is a contemporaneous conference report from 2010. Product names, prices, hosting sites, terminology, and feature comparisons below describe that moment and are not current purchasing guidance. Java EE later became Jakarta EE. CodePlex—not SourceForge—was Microsoft’s separate forge, and Microsoft …
How to Web Conference, random thoughts, mostly live
Archive note (2026): The opening paragraph contains the corrupt fragment I’vevolatile and utopic place most of the time.; it cannot be reconstructed safely and is left untouched pending an original source or backup. Sadly, today I’ve arrived a bit late, where "a bit" means a lot; I’vevolatile and utopic place most of the …
Using Firebug as a scalpel, yet not for web development
Historical and safety note (2026): Firebug reached end of life; its functionality moved into Firefox’s built-in Developer Tools. Adobe ended Flash Player support on December 31, 2020, and Flash is unsafe to install. Deleting a DOM node in Developer Tools is temporary and local: it does not change the server, undo requests …
Making Rails asset pipeline faster
This article reflects the 2016-era Rails asset pipeline—Ruby Sass, libsass, Compass, therubyracer, and Node.js 6—and is not current Rails asset guidance. We all know that for a rather large Rails app with a substantial front end, the asset pre-compilation and more importantly - development mode changes are far from …
Chunked transfer encoding in Rails (streaming)
Anyone who has written a little PHP knows what the flush() family of functions do. The ideal usage scenario for using chunked transfer[0] is when we have something costly to render e.g. the first three most recent articles on a blog. Why, one might ask? Why stream It is rather simple: in a normal Rails render, the server …
Shedding some light into UUID version 4 in Ruby and Rails
Ruby's standard library and Rails's PostgreSQL adapter use by default version 4 UUIDs. This could be changed in Rails migrations via: Archive note (2015; updated context 2024): These excerpts describe Rails 4.2-era behavior, not current defaults. RFC 4122 was obsoleted by RFC 9562 in May 2024; UUIDv4 has 122 random bits …
How to Web conference, random thoughts, mostly live - five years later
Almost five years since the last post about How to Web [0] - wow, that's a large slice of the space-time continuum. I recall I almost started this blog for stuff like this, good memories [1]. Archive note (2015): This is a contemporaneous conference diary; links, organizations, and social-media handles are preserved as …
Building a small blog cms in rails
Editor’s note (2026): This is a 2010 architectural sketch, not a current Rails security tutorial. RBAC is not inherently required for a single-author blog, production is not a substitute for automated or staging security tests, and authorization should fail closed under a current threat model. Current guidance Securing …
The analogue programmer in the land of LLMs
It's been a while since I've posted, for obvious reasons a lot has changed in the realm of programming. LLMs, "agentic" coding et al. I've started using them almost from day one, when they were pretty bad and they could barely generate some readable text in their images. When it comes to coding, being in my late 30s, I'm …
The half-life of a programmer
Half-life (t1/2) is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value. The term is very commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay, but it is also used more generally for discussing any type of exponential decay. I had this …
Programming archaeology: PHP's dollar sigil
I started out with Java as my professional language and before I discovered Ruby, PHP was my main programming language of choice for new projects. This was probably six to seven years ago or more. I had some pretty good times with CodeIgniter [0] and various libraries like HHMVC [1]. In any case, I digress - even back …
On writing artisanal code
Every artisan at a certain point in time just stops and starts thinking about the inner workings of his craft. He ponders on the whole process from the outside while trying to make connections between apparently dissimilar entities that his craft is made of. One might argue that this is a purely subjective endeavor: well, …
Multiple data stores and eventual consistency using micro-services
There are cases where ownership of the data consumed by a fleet of microservices is distributed across several systems of record. Derived data is then scattered across multiple storage solutions, each designed to solve a specific problem using a subset of it. It may be mirrored and synchronized into a specific format …