I just finished reading Rails Scales! by Cristian Planas today. Overall, I def recommend this newly published book to folks working in Rails. Depending on how long you’ve been building in Rails, this will either end up as a nice refresher on a lot of commonly overlooked topics or it’ll be exposure to new techniques you haven’t worked with before. For me, it was more refresher than new stuff, but I also found the perspective and insight Cristian touts to be in line with all of my experience. It was such a good book I actually wanted to help improve it by posting some errata back to the author.

AOL released a statement that they will be discontinuing their dial-up internet service as of Septermber 30th, 2025. This includes related services and software, such as the AOL Dialer Software and AOL Shield Browser, which AOL says are “optimized for older operating systems”. While AOL is not the last dial-up internet service provider out there, it is certainly the most notable holdout.

I have one thing to say: if you’re writing code, use SOME kind of backup and/or version control. Please.

One of the things I get frustrated by in our world is dealing with people who are both not terribly good at what they do but also disinterested in getting better. This makes it all the more enjoyable when I find a piece of art (visual, textual, or otherwise) created by someone who has become excellent at their craft. Brent Weeks is one of those folks, in my opinion, and I recently finished revisiting the awesome Night Angel trilogy. So, dear reader, this recommendation is for you if you also enjoy fantasy that involve elements like assassins (or “wetboys”, as it were), magic and mages, kingdoms falling and rising, but most importantly: how to rise above the most challenging situations in life while remaining true to yourself.

Cloudflare (the company who hosts this site at time of writing via its Pages product) just announced “AI Labyrinth”. If you don’t know, Cloudflare is a passthrough for a large portion of the internet. That means it can block or stop certain types of traffic it thinks is malicious. To that end, it created an opt-in feature for sites behind Cloudflare to trap AI bot scrapers targeting sites by giving the bots a ton of fake content… using generative AI. This way, the AI scraper receives a bunch of generic and real information, but the real site isn’t actually scraped. Pretty clever trick, I’d say.