Discourse lags practice in software engineering. I've had the luxury to be out here this year having a ton of conversations with people in software about their daily lives without any kind of agenda other than curiosity. ~6 months ahead of what gets boiled into writing, or more (sometimes much more)

It’s almost 2027 and time again for the Gem Fellowship to support Ruby open source. www.mikeperham.com/2026/10/15/c...

Even if you’re not a teacher, you should read this. So much good sense in it.

Ben Newmark@bennewmark.bsky.social · 3w ago

New. What those who find learning easiest can learn from those who find it hardest. I worked hard on this. bennewmark.wordpress.com/2026/10/15/w...

How do you run thousands of database schema changes at Shopify scale? Shared the story at Vienna.rb last month and the recording is now live on RubyEvents. Thanks for having me, see you at the next winter meetup! www.rubyevents.org/talks/rails-...

Rails Migrations at Scale: How Shopify Moved from Trigger-Based Online Schema Changes to gh-ost

Shopify runs thousands of schema changes per year across a 1.5 PB sharded MySQL database. In this talk, we’ll look at how we preserve the Rails migration experience while executing schema changes safe...

rubyevents.org

https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-not-use-them TIL that passkeys have remote attestation built-in. That seems pretty damn terrible. Don't use passkeys.

Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.

Intended audience: non-technical citizens of the web

nonfunctional.substack.com

ICYMI, the biggest science story this week isn’t the Nobels—it’s OpenAI’s new release that includes multiple Fields Medal-worthy results. The intelligence explosion is sweeping thru math like a wildfire. And it’s probably coming for most everything else, too. What will next week/month/year bring?

Lee Billings@leebillings.bsky.social · last mo.

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: OpenAI’s latest math dump has arrived. It consists of hundreds of new results to major problems, from the same internal model that produced a million-dollar math proof last month. It could take mathematicians years to sift through it all.

A fun fact about neutrinos is that they come in three “flavors” (types) and also in three masses and you would think that this means each flavor has its own mass and you would be absolutely wrong about that.

Hey, Rails peeps. Hot Cell is a suite of gems that helps you secure Active Storage against image library zero-days. I just released v1.0! mike.daless.io/posts/2026/1... Links to Rails World video and slides as well as the project repo and docs are in the post.

Hot Cell v1.0: Securing Active Storage in the age of AI

Hot Cell v1.0 moves Active Storage's image, video, and PDF processing out of your Rails app and into a locked-down sidecar container.

mike.daless.io

Wrote a thing about last week's Rails World. andycroll.com/ruby/look-a...

Look at all the things he's not doing

David's keynote was sure where Rails is heading and quiet on how we get there. The rest of Rails World had better answers.

andycroll.com

I'm working on a new pen testing service. It will use a bug bounty subscription where clients pay nothing when no new vulnerabilities are discovered. Now I'm looking for some guinea pigs! Please ping me if you want a free audit of an online resource you own.

Very forceful statement by Terry Tao about AI and math. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a... Note, he is not claiming the models aren't real and powerful. He's talking about how that power should be used. This, I believe, is what all AI discussions should center.

A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…

terrytao.wordpress.com

important industry terms to know about: B2B: buy to buy SaaS: service as a service MRR/MAU: your cat is hungry

I've seen everyone sharing that US Dialect Quiz so I decided to make my own, much crappier, CANADIAN DIALECT QUIZ to guess where in Canada you're from

Another day, another public incident write-up, another blog post with my thoughts on it. This time, it's @buildkite.bsky.social's excellent recent write-up: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/09/01/t...

Thoughts on the Buildkite Aug 25 incident

The other day, I wrote about a GitHub Actions incident. But GitHub Actions isn’t the only CI-as-a-service out there. Buildkite, which is another CI company, recently released a public write-u…

surfingcomplexity.blog

Here’s the SolidQueue batches 2.5 year architectural journey, filled with O(n^2) algorithms, hot row contention, excessive jobs, and much in between. There’s a strong chance you’ll learn a thing or two - I certainly did 😮‍💨 jpcamara.com/2026/08/31/s...

SolidQueue Batches: evolution and architecture

When Rosa first released SolidQueue, she did a fantastic talk on the internals of how it works and what trade-offs she made when building it. You should give it a watch. It’s where I first learned how...

jpcamara.com

Sometimes I want to write a post, and then I remember that I already wrote it a couple of years ago. So I'll just re-up this one: surfingcomplexity.blog/2024/02/17/w...

What if everybody did everything right?

In the wake of an incident, we want to answer the questions “What happened?” and, afterwards, “What should we do differently going forward?” Invariably, this leads to people…

surfingcomplexity.blog

➡️Americans and Canadians: do YOU recognize this man?⬅️ He collapsed on the streets of Amsterdam in 2023 with a brain injury. He wasn’t carrying ID and he lost most of his ability to communicate. His identity still hasn’t been established. Interviews near […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

The performance difference between json 2.7.6 and 3.0.0 is noticeable in Sidekiq's load testing script (~21.0sec to 20.5sec, ~4-5%). That's really hard to do with mature software like Ruby; Jean's optimization work here has been stellar.

Jean Boussier@byroot.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'll probably release the final 3.0.0 version early September, so if you got time please try the RC1 and submit any feedback you may have: github.com/ruby/json/re...

CURIOSITY HAS BEEN ON MARS FOR 14 YEARS!! HAPPY LANDIVERSARY CURIOSITY!!

"Yikes, Odysseus -- you looke prettye roughe aftir your journeye." "Well, you Odyssey the othir guye!"

These homes on Sherwood Drive look normal, sure. But did you know they’re the site of the only residential zoning appeal in Ottawa to reach the Supreme Court of Canada? It’s a wild story of secret council meetings, expropriations, fake highways—and a side of mustard. 🧵Thread…

This is Comet Leonard during its approach to the Sun, imaged by Gerald Rhemann on Christmas Day 2021. The comet had been discovered earlier that year, and broke apart in 2022. This photo won the overall prize for Rhemann of the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022.

Ok. As promised, a thread about supply chain food safety vulnerabilities in the food industry. Buckle up. It's a long one.

Like….everybody shut the fuck up and stop fighting. You are taking the wrong fucking lesson from this border-crossing smoke nightmare. The lesson is *all of earth’s ecosystems are entwined, borders mean nothing, all emitters are culpable, this is an EARTH PROBLEM NOT A COUNTRY PROBLEM*.

A haunting, sad but hopeful imagined version of what America’s end might feel like to the future, which hits very differently now from when I planned the speech back in 2006. It compares America to the first human infant carried & born in space, & wracked by the consequences.

Word Family Friday@wordfamilyfriday.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Sometimes, I think of the words of Mycroft Canner on Feb 16, 2455 (@adapalmer.bsky.social _Perhaps the Stars_, 2021) “THE OLD UNITED STATES OF AMERICA remind me very much of Terra the Moon Baby. Both were crisis births, sudden necessities when too much damage made healing and homecoming impossible.

This was a great read. I have so much respect for long-term open source maintainers and it's often a thankless job. So thank you, @flavorjon.es !

Mike Dalessio@flavorjon.es · 4mo ago

I had so much fun speaking with the Once a Maintainer folks about being an open source maintainer and some of the security work that's involved. I hope you give it a read and enjoy! ❤️ onceamaintainer.substack.com/p/once-a-mai...

I'm generally in favour of space exploration and would love to see a research outpost on the moon or Mars. This book opened my eyes to the many challenges and unknowns that we still need to solve before we can get there, let alone actual settlements. Very well written and a fun read!

Dan McCrum@mccrum.bsky.social · 5mo ago

For all would-be SpaceX investors, reading "A City on Mars" is a strong recommend. Very funny on the many ways space is terrible, uneconomic, and the decades/centuries of (boring, non-phallic rocket related) research needed to make settlement even a vaguely realistic proposition.

I've started publishing SHA256 sums for each sidekiq gem release. Is anyone aware of any better tooling for integrity verification for published binaries before I homebrew a bunch of scripts? It's pretty awkward as is. https://sidekiq.org/sha256sum.txt

This thread has great advice for anyone giving a technical presentation. I've learned a few of these the hard way!

Mike Wiser@drmikewiser.bsky.social · 5mo ago

My primary academic conference is in a few weeks. I have given a good number of conference presentations over the years, and possibly moderated even more often than I've presented. Advice for anyone who wants it, in a thread: