iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 20/09/2026

Rails World 2026, here I come! Will be my first time attending a conference in the US 👀

Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 06/06/2026

Great stuff! I will see you there! It’ll will be my first Ruby event of the year since the triathlon. Hoping to get a few more booked in before the end of the year.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 14/01/2026

I think that was only added to the docs in the last few months. I tried to wrap my head around it a few times but couldn’t figure out why/when that would be useful. 🤔

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 13/12/2025

Command invokers are going to be great too 👀

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 13/12/2025

Looking forward to seeing sibling-index() & sibling-count() supported in more browsers 🙌

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 11/12/2025

Ooh I need to find the time to do this. Definitely planning on @brightonruby.com this year, so will see you there! Still need to figure out what else! 🤔

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 11/11/2025

I have maximum FOMO as I won’t be able to make either of them 😭

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 14/09/2025

That’s the second stop of the #rubytriathlon over. @friendlyrb.com was amazing, such a welcoming and inclusive conference that lives up to its name. Looking forward to @euruko.org this week!

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 06/09/2025

Had such a great time at Rails World! Great to spend time with friends and so many great announcements for RoR. Back on the rails again now though for stop 2 @friendlyrb.com next week.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 06/09/2025

This is amazing. Absolutely huge thanks to @marcoroth.dev 🙏

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 02/09/2025

Time to go! 3 weeks of travel and conferences as part of the #RubyTriathlon with much of it on rails 🚂

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/08/2025

Looking forward to doing this next month! I should probably figure out how I’m travelling between them all though 😅

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/08/2025

Wait, there’s actual running involved too? 👀 I was planning on bringing a gym kit anyway so I’d be down to join any runs!

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/03/2025

Ticket has been acquired! Looking forward to this! Just need to secure tickets to Rails World, and EuRuKo to partake in the www.rubytriathlon.com 👀

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 24/01/2025

Okay, now I’m very interested to see this! 👀 this looks very nice!

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/01/2025

I could probably write a whole post on each principle, they've all had a major influence on me at some point, but these were just a few that often strongly resonate on reflection. agilemanifesto.org/principles.h...

agilemanifesto.org

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/01/2025

"Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done." Adopting the tools of Shape Up and defining work at the right level of detail (not over/under shaped) has been the best way I've found to achieve this.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/01/2025

"Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential." This one has honestly saved me and teams I've worked with more times than I could count. Don't build things you don't need. Don't build overly complicated things.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/01/2025

"Working software is the primary measure of progress." If you're giving a status update, show the darn thing, working or not. Always a little challenging if you're doing a refactor, or something particularly data/backend focused, but do it anyway.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/01/2025

Occasionally I find myself reflecting on the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto - and it always surprises me just how much they've formed a foundational basis for my own product/software development philosophies that continue to provide value. Here's a couple that I find particularly of note: 🧵

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 31/12/2024

Nice! Tailwind v4 beta is great, I've been building a new app with it recently. It's nice being able to actually use CSS along with all the power of Tailwind.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 14/12/2024

Medium used to be so good! But yeah, if I see a Medium post today I mostly avoid it. If I do click through I usually get hit with a paywall and abandon at that point.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 12/12/2024

Either that or name the predicate method differently to something like: all_access_previously_became_true? But to your point in the post, I’m not sure that makes things any better.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 12/12/2024

Good post! I feel like, if I was writing the original code, I probably would have put the conditional on the after_save_commit hook - as a lambda though rather than a predicate method of a similar name. Easier to see the side effects and their triggers in one place then.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 11/12/2024

I like this, reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties but much simpler. I feel like the 15 properties probably take this a level further though by exploring the relationships between CRAP.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/12/2024

Status enums are a slippery slope At some point you’ll want to know when something reached a certain status, or you’ll have some combination of statuses that have some special meaning, and it spawns complexity Nullable dates work much better. If you must have a status, consider a status model

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 07/12/2024

AeroSapce is great! I've been using it for a few months now. I used Amethyst before but it was a little clunky with multiple monitors, whereas I rarely have any issues with AeroSpace.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/12/2024

It’s Ruby! I love the elegance of it, super fun to work with.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/12/2024

Day 5 of #AdventOfCode, no fancy methods today, solution feels somewhat noddy but I like how the page ordering came together in the end with passing an array of dependent indexes to sort by.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/12/2024

A few years ago Ryan Singer did a pretty good primer on Christopher Alexander’s work in a live steam. I’m not sure it really covered this book specifically but it was a pretty good summary for anyone getting started. vimeo.com/491222729

vimeo.com

Christopher Alexander: A Primer

Christopher Alexander’s work is hard to get into. He’s written over 15 books, and there isn't one that serves as a general intro or overview for…

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/12/2024

I found it interesting to think about how Law of Demeter is actually just influencing the locality of a Connascence of Name. Though with the language we can weigh up the effects of the other properties too, by implementing law of demeter, do we increase the strength or degree of connascence?

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/12/2024

Totally, great language here too. It gives us much more expressiveness both in terms of the form of coupling and impact of that based upon it's strength, degree and locality. We might ask how we might influence the properties, or transform the type of coupling.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 04/12/2024

Been having fun with #AdventOfCode so far. Thought I'd share some of my solutions, so here's day 4: I've been trying to incorporate and learn about some lesser used Ruby methods, today's was repeated_permutation to generate all the different directions the search should move in.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 03/12/2024

I feel like I’ve heard some of those terms before but this site is a goldmine, thanks for sharing! Added to my list to have a good proper read through when I have some time.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 01/12/2024

I think it would depend somewhat on the exact method and it's outputs but it doesn't immediately feel 'unidiomatic' to me. There are several Ruby methods that kind of do this: Array#transpose, Enumerable#partition, Enumerable#minmax and Numeric#divmod for example.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 01/12/2024

Personally, I prefer one handle. Feels more authentic rather than trying to make a calculated decision about what segment or audience a certain topic belongs to. It’s also more fun to learn about other hobbies and activities people are into.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 29/11/2024

Tailscale really is a joy to use. The airfield I help operate runs some software that uploads weather data to our website, but it’s old and only supports insecure FTP for uploads. No issue – just run an FTP server in Docker and bind it to a private ip through Tailscale.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 29/11/2024

Ooh this is cool. I was already planning to make Rails World 2025, might try to do the others too.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 27/11/2024

Very excited about the direction Tailwind is heading with v4, specifically the CSS-first stuff, and modern CSS features. It's a shame it'll always require a build step but at least it's minimal with their cli/standalone builder. tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwin...

tailwindcss.com

Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1 - Tailwind CSS

After a long alpha period, we're excited to release the first public beta of Tailwind CSS v4.0.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 26/11/2024

For my projects, so far, I've actually been able to go a long way with just progressive web apps and responsive design. The jump to native with Hotwire Native isn't that valuable for me right now. That said I've been building things with the option to use it later in mind.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 20/11/2024

This is cool. CSS anchor positioning is something I've been looking forward to being able to use for a long time. The web is becoming so much less reliant on JS for many interactions and I am so here for it.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 10/11/2024

Not a fan of "skeets" either, surely if anything, they should be "flutters" 🦋

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 08/11/2024

If I recall correctly Cloudflare pages is pretty good for this, you can just upload the file directly to the console.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 08/11/2024

Here’s how I write commit messages (even if no one else will see them): Use imperative mood. Use sentence case. Explain purpose of change. Use body if more complex change. Start with an emoji: gitmoji.dev. Anyone unfamiliar with the code (likely my future self) can use them to understand it.

gitmoji.dev

gitmoji

An emoji guide for your commit messages.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 06/11/2024

What printer do you have? I've been getting that itch for 3d printing again lately. I have a very old Prusa i3 in storage, it's from before they released the MK1, it's a real pain to use (requires manual bed levelling, among other things) so it's probably time for an upgrade 😅.

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 05/11/2024

I was amazed the other day at how easy it is to connect to the “firehose” of Bluesky and just see every interaction in real-time. With just one gem, and several lines of code. 🤯 github.com/mackuba/skyf...

github.com

GitHub - mackuba/skyfall: A Ruby gem for streaming data from the Bluesky/AtProto firehose

A Ruby gem for streaming data from the Bluesky/AtProto firehose - mackuba/skyfall

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Josh Brown @joshantbrown.com · 03/11/2024

Active Worlds also had an SDK for C/C++ and Visual Basic that let anyone create an in-world bot. People used it to create entire RPG games, paintball, and various other experiences and tools. It created a space that made it easy to access lots of tech, and people doing interesting things with it.

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