I recently gave a talk on software complexity, Single Page Applications and Hotwire (slides). Due to time constraints, I ended up cutting off a whole section on narratives that are often Trojan horses for unjustified complexity and decided to write it down instead. These narratives are: • It doesn’t scale • Tech giant uses it • In the ...

I've been using Evernote since September of 2010. I started as a passionate user, and it quickly became an indispensable part of my workflow. Then, the product started to go south, slowly but steadily. The clients became more complex, heavier, and uglier. They added a ton of features nobody asked for. And they didn't improve the one th...

As a longtime fan of Basecamp copy, I always enjoy asking for help with user-facing texts I need. This time we had to send an email to some users that were impacted by a bug. I went to Jim Mackenzie. Here's the before and after. Before: “Hi <name>, We recently discovered a bug in HEY where it could fail to move emails to the designated...

Documenting the pull request to add encryption to Active Record brought me memories about the origin of each feature: • Support for unencrypted data: HEY was already used by staff and some beta users when we added encryption. • Option to downcase: emails are not case-sensitive. • Option to ignore case: labels are case-insensitive when ...

Shopify recently published Upgrow: A sustainable architecture for Ruby on Rails. It describes a set of architectural principles to build Rails applications and announces a companion future gem. I was surprised by seeing Shopify endorse this approach. The proposed patterns aren't new. Many people have advocated for them since Rails is R...