iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 19/01/2026

Ironically the Girl Scout website has a cookie banner on their cookie website 🤣 Flavors at www.girlscouts.org/en/cookies/c... You’ll buy the course, I’ll email you, you pick what flavors you want for your 4 boxes, give me your address, and then you’ll have some cookies and Phlex 💪

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 15/11/2025

It’s not like they can just upload files to that repo, they’re disabled!

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 16/10/2025

I think @joel.drapper.me gets enjoyment out of the names he chooses for his gems 😂

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 03/10/2025

Every time I have to do this, I think about @indirect.io's `rv` presentations at the @sfruby.bsky.social meetups.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 26/09/2025

I have two stale branches I’d like to remove, but they’re pretty high. Gotta do the thing where I swing some rope up there and pull it or climb the main branch.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 22/09/2025

My daughter’s Friday folder in tonight’s earthquake. earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 23/08/2025

Of course field kits work from regular Phlex too, but it's not that big of a flex to show Phlex working inside of Phlex.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 23/08/2025

I stole the Phlex::Kit idea from @joel.drapper.me, dropped it into Superform, and this is what it looks like rendered from Erb. Notice how Superform doesn't have <%%> soup? On the right is one of the best Rails form helpers, simple_form. Pretty sure this means I built the best Rails form lib. 💪😎

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 12/08/2025

Playing with the beautifulruby.com/articles page. I include a photograph I took for each article so I'm trying to prominently feature it in hopes that it stands out in a good way. Thoughts? I'm going to add an RSS feed, email sub, and the beautifulruby.com/code pages next.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 12/08/2025

I can see how professionals who use macOS are going to be much more eager to try Linux distributions when Apple inexplicably does stuff like ship an operating system where windows all have different radii. It's unbelievable to see a software company seriously push something like this in a beta. 🤷

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 01/08/2025

Figured out a more concise explanation of service objects 🤣

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 23/07/2025

Upgrading Thingybase.com from Rails 7.0 and Phlex 1.0 for the example app in my Phlex on Rails video course at beautifulruby.com/phlex 💪 I'm not a fan of how most courses use demo apps in their content, so I'm going to use a real production app and keep shipping improvements to users.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 23/07/2025

Yeah, he had this cool transition where the two sides of this side merged into a Phlex snippet, then everybody got up, formed a circle, joined hands, and sang & dance in perfect harmony.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 19/07/2025

This is why it's important to share whatever it is you're working on as early as possible with real people and talk to them! Since I caught this early, I can update my ffmpeg encoding scripts w/ 2K res files. If I just threw it on the web, people would see this & quietly bounce.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 14/07/2025

For the Phlex on Rails course at beautifulruby.com/phlex, I've landed on building a website where devs can create & share color themes for their code editors. The killer feature will be that it automatically generates the configuration files for your editor, terminal, etc. so you can copy & paste.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 10/07/2025

Today is Thursday, so two more days-ish until the $249 pre-orders go up to $289 and I start publishing videos. 💁🏻‍♂️📹 If you have some training budget burning a hole in your pocket and are Phlex-curious, head on over to beautifulruby.com/phlex#invest 💪

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 10/07/2025

This is the best part from the Brut website🤣 Now that Phlex exists, HAML, Slim, & like markups are in an uncanny valley. The choice should be Phlex or Erb. Everything else is middle ground.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 07/06/2025

Here's another design for a completely different set of content where I share interesting code snippets that I write or find. Syntax highlighting colors are way off and I think it needs more spacing, but I'm loving the "full bleed" feel to these designs.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 07/06/2025

Playing with the design for articles on the beautifulruby.com website. Learning towards something like this where I overlay the title over a gigantic image with a bit of the content showing. If you scroll down, the content ends up being solid white so its easy to read.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 17/04/2025

The Email API we've always wanted in Rails. It's kinda bonkers how convoluted ActionMailer is... feels nothing at all like composing and sending an email. Would anybody use this? I think it's more intuitive. Crack open one file per email and it's all there.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 28/03/2025

Successfully used Superlink in a project, but I'm not totally happy with it yet, so I updated the README to push my brain closer to something that I think will work even better. Not full baked yet, but this will be by next experiment to see if I like it. Source at github.com/rubymonolith...

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 14/03/2025

Dropping a @terminalwire.com demo next week that's going to show how to make SaaS/API onboarding and developer experience not suck. Most SaaS that onboards devs have you jump through insane amounts of hoops just to get a damn API key. I think the standard should be "run these two commands".

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 14/03/2025

One of my fav places to work when it’s raining outside is the garage. It’s a bit chilly out here today 🥶, but the sound of the rain is quite nice.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 13/03/2025

Who is going to watch the "blood moon" total lunar eclipse tonight? 🙋

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 08/03/2025

The latest addition to my vast domain empire.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 04/03/2025

Just looked at legiblenews.com/plus subscriptions and notice an uptick in Nov '24—anybody want to guess why? 😅 Hint: Legible News doesn't repeat headlines, is only updated once per day or week, and is devoid of hyperbole. My favorite claim is I save people 313 days from the news.

Subscription uptick in November 2024 for Legiblenews.com

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 25/02/2025

This week I cranked away on the terminalwire.com landing page. I tightened up the hero to pitch the idea that Terminalwire is how you ship an awesome developer experience and replaced the 6 month old prototype video with an 8 minute tour. Please roast it and LMK what could be better! 🔥🔥🔥

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 24/02/2025

The amount of problems this `git ls-files -z` is bonkers given that it's the default for bundler when creating new gems. The "intent" behind this is to make sure when `rake release` is run from a shell, files don't get in there that are not committed. I'm moving that check to a rake task instead.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 24/02/2025

Here's the core of a REPL testing library I'm putting together in my RSpecs for @terminalwire.com. Next steps are to reduce the verbosity of the code with some nice RSpec matchers. Gist at gist.github.com/bradgessler/... if you want to kick the tires on it.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 07/02/2025

Just dropped 0.1.13 of `url-builder` gem, which adds support for path traversal on URIs. You can read more about it at github.com/rubymonolith...

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 07/02/2025

For example, when I switched @tinyzap.com from Puma to @ioquatix.bsky.social's Falcon server, my entire web application was much more responsive and loads faster in the browser because each image you see in the screenshot below fires a request to Rails to get the image URL.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 06/02/2025

One of the biggest surprises I've had lately was realizing that Ruby programs could be compiled into 15Mb binaries that run on macOS, Linux, and Windows without Ruby or development dependencies needed on the target machines. This is how I'm distributing the @terminalwire.com thin-client. 🤫

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 03/02/2025

Drafting this Wednesday's article, which looks at the internals I used to get Superview working. The part I'm most excited about sharing is how to make Rails controller actions respond to bulk form actions. Here's last weeks week's article about Superview: terminalwire.com/articles/sup...

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 31/01/2025

The final CFP is how Rails devs can ship a command-line interface to their users, similar to Github and Stripe's command-line tools. I'll discuss how the way most do it today is like single page JS apps, and how @terminalwire.com makes takes the "Hotwire" approach. This one could be a workshop.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 31/01/2025

The next CFP I submitted is about building Rails apps from the ground up with ViewComponent and Phlex components. The slides themselves are a Rails app built entirely out of Phlex components, which is open-source BTW if you want to build your RailsConf deck this way.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 31/01/2025

RailsConf CFPs are up! My first submission: WWDHHD The goal of this talk is to encourage people to think more about solving the problems they encounter and less about "how would DHH do this?" If accepted and delivered, my hopes are that this talk makes all web frameworks better, including Rails.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 30/01/2025

Technically it's not an XSS attack because `ViewComponent` doesn't exist and the example I provided absolutely won't run unless I change to `ViewComponent::Base`. 🤣 Pushing out this fix as I wonder why people still use Erb. 🤔 Thanks for pushing safe code examples that run. 🙏

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 28/01/2025

This little toolkit is how I got started making money with computers. I’d use it to open up the neighbors PC and charge them for doing RAM upgrades, replacing broken hard drives, slapping in a video card so they could run Windows 95. Not much to it.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 24/01/2025

One of my favorite things about the terminalwire.sh URLs is how readable they are—checkout tinyzap.terminalwire.sh in your browser or on curl and you'll see the instructions for the script itself.

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 24/01/2025

Rarely do you see a software timeline ahead of schedule, but that's where I'm at with @terminalwire.com. 🙌 I got native binaries running on macOS and Linux with arm64 and x86_64. and Terminalwire apps can be installed via `curl -Ls tinyzap.terminalwire.sh | bash`

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Brad Gessler @bradgessler.com · 17/01/2025

Hell yes, I finally got a one-file Terminalwire binary running on Ubuntu, installable via a bash one-liner. 🤠 In the second screenshot, you can see @usetrmnl.com running inside of an Ubuntu arm64 machine. Clients will run on x86_64 & arm64 for macOS & Linux. Can't wait to button this up and 🚢 it!

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