iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 22/06/2026

Could have spent another few months in Greece.

Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 05/11/2025

Shoutout to @marcoroth.dev for Herb. Just fixed a bunch of small typos in our HTML that it found. Browsers are pretty good at fixing these issues automatically, but I'd sure rather be sending correct HTML instead.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 08/09/2025

My office coworker, asleep on the job.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 28/08/2025

May have went a bit off the Rails™ in my Rails World talk this year...

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 08/08/2025

I might have to port @gorails.com to Wordpress for April Fools. 🤔

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 18/07/2025

FerrumPDF now adds custom renderers to Rails for a much cleaner integration. You now call "render" just like you would for JSON or HTML and out pops a PDF of the page. @gorails.com lesson on this soon!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 11/07/2025

Hope you all had a great final @railsconf! We loved hanging out with you all. 💖

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 09/07/2025

Starting off community day at RailsConf with the community panel. 🎉

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 17/06/2025

I like the #Rails Authentication generator's authenticate-by-default functionality. If you're using Devise, you can easily replicate this with the following.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 10/06/2025

Just added Git LFS support for @hatchbox.io apps. 🎉

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 10/06/2025

You know it's a bad outage when even the status page is down.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 30/05/2025

Just finished upgrading Hatchbox.io to use Stripe Billing Meters now that Usage Records are deprecated. Thought I'd share how the upgrade process works because I've not really needed to use Subscription Schedules until now.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 28/05/2025

Added a new section to the LearnHotwire.com course on testing Hotwire with Integration & System tests. 🎉

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 26/05/2025

The LearnHotwire.com course now has certificates of completion. You can download them as a PDF to share with your employer or whoever you like.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 24/05/2025

It's not an official Rails text editor until someone tags this bridge.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 08/05/2025

DigitalOcean now blocks outbound SMTP by default, so @jumpstartrails.com now uses APIs for sending email with supported email providers. Sending email via API is also typically faster than SMTP handshakes too.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 24/04/2025

It's been a while since I did in line to buy anything but got a Switch 2 preorder!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 11/04/2025

For those of you wondering why Jason is no longer on the Remote Ruby podcast.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 10/04/2025

In Vegas for Sin City Ruby now. It's been a busy couple of weeks but nothing beats hanging out with Ruby friends around the world. 💖

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 08/04/2025

In Philly for our site visit for Railsconf with @rubycentral.org! It is freezing and windy this morning but the weather will be great in July.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 02/04/2025

In Brazil for the first time and ready for Tropical on Rails!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 01/04/2025

I finally found an old floppy disk with some of the old QBasic games I made!! Here's the hangman game that really started my love of programming. github.com/excid3/qbasi...

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 27/03/2025

🔥 Protip: VCR has a `re_record_interval` option to help you automatically re-record HTTP requests after a given time period so you're always up-to-date with the latest responses for your API calls.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 19/03/2025

Tracking conferences with @usetrmnl.com is super handy.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 13/03/2025

New computer day is always fun.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 07/01/2025

🔥 Rails Protip: It can be annoying to have both nil and "" for optional attributes. While the column default might be nil, submitting a form with an empty field will change it to "". You can use `normalizes` and `.presence` to convert empty Strings to nil for consistency.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 30/12/2024

I think they moved this just out of shot when they took the picture

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 30/12/2024

Just updated SellRepo.com to Ruby 3.4.1 and TailwindCSS v4 beta. I really like configuring Tailwind in CSS instead of JS.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 25/12/2024

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 13/12/2024

In Ruby 3.4, you'll start seeing warnings about frozen string literals. If you still need mutable strings, create a new String object instead of using the literal syntax. String literals will work like symbols where they point to the same object in memory which is great for performance.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 23/11/2024

This is wild. @masilotti.com shaved off 6,000 lines of Swift code upgrading @jumpstartrails.com iOS to Hotwire Native. Jumpstart Pro Rails, iOS and Android go on sale next week for Black Friday, so keep an eye out if you want to grab a copy and turn your Rails apps into native apps!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 22/11/2024

black_friday is a new Ruby gem you can use for adding sales to your Ruby & Rails apps. Register sales, check which ones are active and use it to display banners, change pricing pages, or whatever you want! github.com/excid3/black...

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 16/11/2024

Had a great time catching up with everyone this week at #RubyConf I'll see you at RailsConf in Philly next July?!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 11/11/2024

Packing the essentials for #RubyConf this week. Come find me and say hi!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 09/11/2024

Excited to read up on this new Rails 8 release this winter. Thanks Micro Center!

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 07/11/2024

I love coming back to an old piece of code and realizing it can be greatly simplified. It's a great way to measure your progress as a developer.

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Chris Oliver @excid3.com · 27/04/2023

That's a wrap for #Railsconf. Met some amazing people and caught up with old friends. Until next year!

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