Bradley Schaefer
soulcutter@ruby.social
<p>He/him. Ruby developer, sometimes engineering manager, and recovering cynic.</p><p>Outside of tech: dad, reader of fantasy/sci-fi, player of videogames, haver of tattoos, and fan of baseball and stand-up comedy.</p>
Posts
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Post #4334251
I met Brian Poindexter today at our local Summerfest. He’s running for Congress to unseat the odious Max Miller, and more importantly to fight for working class families. He’s a real one - genuine guy, not a career politician. When we took this picture he told us to make sure to post it and spread the word https://poindexterforcongress.com/ #ohio #uspol
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Post #4334250
Today is a bad day to use MM-DD-YY format. 27-07-26 It looks incredibly like yesterday&#39;s date to anyone who sanely expects year to come first ala ISO-8601 2026-07-27 MM-DD-YY is _terrible_ . I beg you, never use that format.
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Post #4334249
I spent most of my day redesigning a backend authentication library which was a total yak shave stemming from changing a constant integer. I might accidentally be a security engineer now. 😅
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Post #4334248
I enjoyed The Odyssey. It’s a good theater movie. For a long movie I thought it flew by. Oh, and the sound design was excellent all the way through.
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Post #2194227
It’s that time of year again when I have to decide whether or not to renew gardengnomefeet.com
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Post #2194226
Hot take: the VAST majority of the time you should be deleting database records and avoiding creating a `deleted_at` flag and carrying deleted things in your database. Once you have active/inactive records, all your queries get more complicated, and you need to think a LOT more about how the lifecycle of these records works in connection with its relations and other biz logic. It gets hairy quickly.
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Post #2194225
I&#39;m still learning jj vcs, and here&#39;s a confusion I have. In my workflow I might push a bookmark to a git remote, need to make changes, `jj commit` and then want to push the new commits. I can `jj bookmark advance` however that moves the bookmark to @ which is an empty commit of my working set. Why would I _ever_ want to bookmark that? Obviously I want to advance the bookmark to `@-` I hear there&#39;s a config revsets.bookmark-advance-to I can set to @- But why that de...
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Post #2194224
I’ve never been able to articulate with specificity about my concern with using your database as your job queue, and I came across an article with concrete examples of how postgres can break down under queueing workloads: https://richyen.com/postgres/2026/05/04/postgres_job_queue.html There is nothing about ruby in this article, but I suspect (without verifying) it’s 100% applicable to rails database job queues.
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Post #2085451
I do not love that Google Gemini calls its AI skills or whatever “gems”. Not to be confused with Ruby’s gems. Now I have to mentally disambiguate in business conversations depending on context. I only care about the Ruby ones, and have little interest in peoples’ markdown files.
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Post #1673705
Well crap, my eagerly awaited 3DS Fire Emblem game arrived… and was an empty jewel case. Son of a #retrogaming
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Post #1588826
A stray brain cell fired, reminding me of the BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon, which got me wondering what “Seth Able” was doing. Did some sleuthing, and I guess the developers name was “Seth Robinson” (not “Able” - did I misremember? A pseudonym? Anyway). He’s in Japan and has a small game company, posting regularly on his website https://rtsoft.com/ #retrogaming
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Post #1588825
I successfully used jj to rebase a commit (revset?), arrange some commits, and squash. Pushing changes to github was/is still a slight headscratcher to me - it’s at the intersection of jj and git - but still, I got it done and it wasn’t too painful. I like the jj log . There’s still git-like stuff I’m trying to either translate or unlearn for jj, but I’m less lost than yesterday. 🦾 #git #jj
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Post #1588824
Am I the only one who feels this way about Kalita Wave coffee filters? #coffee
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Post #1526784
Another rubocop/standardrb gripe: Style/EmptyLiteral: Use hash literal {} instead of Hash.new Nah, I have my own heuristics for when to use which one. If it's inside a block with braces, I assert that: # the "approved" butthole syntax let(:params) { {} } looks worse than # ain't nothing wrong with this let(:params) { Hash.new } #rubocop #standardrb #ruby
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Post #1507790
It’s not true that half of people are below average intelligence. Half of people are below median intelligence, though.
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Post #1507789
I picked up jj to learn today, and have gotten lost pretty quick. Learning is hard - it’s hard to conjure a beginner’s mind when you’ve got a fairly well-built mental model in something similar
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Post #1110880
Realistically I think AI is creating security vulnerabilities that are huge, glaring problems far outpacing the vulnerabilities they are catching. Remember Moltbook, for example?
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Post #1110879
Yellow onions are superior to red onions.
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Post #953845
I’m not sure how to respond to well-meaning peoples’ AI PRs. I was looking at an RSpec one, and… it needs a lot of work. That work becomes the reviewer’s, though, and I would almost end up rewriting it myself. I’m glad I am only on the periphery of this stuff
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Post #950520
A random communication &quot;trick&quot; I&#39;ve been working on for years is to replace my usage of the word &quot;but&quot; with &quot;and&quot;. Avoiding negation feels much clearer, because you come across as less-conflicted. Give it a try. For example: We need to frobulate, but that means bingaling --&gt; We need to frobulate, and that means bingaling
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Post #945472
Conventional commit format sucks. What you really want is to use git trailers. The subject line of a commit message is PRIME real estate, and shouldn&#39;t be wasted on tools https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/
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Post #943968
I have been binge watching Tojima Wants To Be a Kamen Rider, and I don’t know why I’m hooked but I am. The riders fight each other more than Shocker. I think the background music contributes bigly to my enjoyment. It’s so cheesy but charming also. https://crunchyroll.com/series/GT00364945/tojima-wants-to-be-a-kamen-rider #anime #crunchyroll
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Post #943966
I really need to start meditating again. It’s weird how some obviously-positive habits can be hard for me to keep.