Sorry, Dave, ADHD is real, and (not acknowledging it) can hurt you. Hi. I’m Richard. I’m a Ruby Core Contributor. I also code in Rust, and enjoy giving talks and writing books about How to (Contribute to) Open Source. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30’s. I would give you a more precise timeline, but time perception isn’t my thing. What does it mean that I was “diagnosed?” Am I simply a speed junkie (yes, I am prescribed and take a low dose of Lisdexamfetamine, AKA Vyvanse)? What even is ADHD, and why is there so much misinformation and misunderstanding about it? First off. What was my di ..read more

I’ve spent the last decade+ working on Ruby deploy tooling, including (but not limited to) the Heroku classic and upcoming Cloud Native Buildpack. If you want to contribute to a Ruby deployment or packaging tool (even if it’s not one I maintain), I can help. If you want to learn more about Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) and maybe get a green square on GitHub (or TWO!), keep reading for more resources. Note: This post is for an in-person hackday event at RubyConf 2024 happening on Thursday, November 14th. If you found this but are away from the event, you can still follow along, but I won’t be ..read more

I love the power of containers, but I’ve never loved Dockerfile. In this post we’ll build a working OCI image of a Ruby on Rails application that can run locally without the need to write or maintain a Dockerfile. You will learn about the Cloud Native Buildpack (CNB) ecosystem, and how to utilize the pack CLI to build images. Let’s get to it! This post is extracted from a tutorial I wrote for Heroku Cloud Native Buildpacks. Future revisions will be updated on the GitHub repo. Install the pack CLI We assume you have docker installed and a working copy of git. Next, you will need to install th ..read more

What exactly does use and mod do in Rust? And how exactly do I “require” that other file I just made? This article is what I wish I could have given a younger me. This post starts with a fast IDE-centric tutorial requiring little prior knowledge. Good if you have a Rust project and want to figure out how to split up files. Afterward, I’ll dig into details so you can understand how to reason about file loading and modules in Rust. Tip: If you enjoy this article, check out my book How to Open Source to help you transform from a coder to an open source contributor. Tutorial: Naievely require/lo ..read more

The other day I got another question about the zombocom org on GitHub that prompted me to write this post. This org, github.com/zombocom, holds most all of my popular libraries). Why put them in a custom GitHub org, and why name it zombocom? Let’s find out. Why a custom org? If you’re maintaining one or two libraries, keeping them in your GitHub user’s namespace is easy enough. For me, this is https://github.com/schneems. The zombocom org has 18 libraries, 16 of which I created. I want to encourage people to contribute to my libraries, so I’ve taken to giving commit access to developers who la ..read more

I came to love pairing after I hurt my hands and couldn’t type. I had to finish up the last 2 months of a graduate CS course without the ability to use a keyboard. I had never paired before but enlisted several other developers to type for me. After I got the hang of the workflow, I was surprised that even when coding in a language my pair had never written in (C or C++), they could spot bugs and problems as we went. Toward the end, I finished the assignments faster when I wasn’t touching the keyboard, than I was by myself. Talking aloud forced me to refine my thoughts before typing anything ..read more

Today is the day. How to Open Source is now available for purchase at howtoopensource.dev. As a reader of my blog, you can take $5 off with the discount code opensource5. Plus, purchase of the book will come with an invitation to join a private Slack community. You will get me as your open source coach (think writing coach and personal trainer!), watch me break down problems live, and have your questions answered so you can get your PRs merged ..read more

Today I’m going to share my perspective on how Ruby on Rails is developed and governed and how I feel the Basecamp “incident” impacts the future of Rails. I’m going to start out telling you what I know for sure, dip into some unknowns, and dive into some hypotheticals for fun ..read more

TravisCI.org is dead. Long live the new CI! TravisCI.org was THE way to run CI for an open source Ruby library. It was so easy that it was seemingly effortless. Even better, it was free. Since the slow-motion collapse of the product, developers have been pushed to other CI providers. I was recently tasked with transferring CI away from Travis for my library derailed_benchmarks and chose CircleCI. This post is a little about why I chose CircleCI, a little about how the transition worked, and a little about nostalgia ..read more

Have you ever hit an error that you just plain hate? Back in 2006, I was learning to program Ruby and following an example from a book. I typed in what I saw, hit enter, and ran into a supremely frustrating error message ..read more