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Robby Russell

@robbyonrails.com
2.2K followers 190 following 670 posts

F'uncle of six. CEO @PlanetArgon.com. Host @maintainable.fm. Creator of @ohmyz.sh. Guitarist @mightymissoula.com. Host of On Rails podcast. robbyonrails.com/links

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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 01/10/2026
Thanks again to everyone who came to my Rails World keynote, said hello afterward, or reached out since. Unfortunately, the official recording left out a fairly important part of the talk. Thankfully, I was able to recover the missing footage.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 30/09/2026
Meanwhile... @rails is nearing 100k git commits. Less than 200 to go! cc: @tenderlove.dev
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 29/09/2026
A snippet from my keynote last week at #RailsWorld about The Lie.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 29/09/2026
We spend too much time trying to prevent mistakes... I’m increasingly interested in making them cheaper. Preview environments. Staging. Feature flags. Tests. Easy rollbacks. These all help make recovery cheaper.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 29/09/2026
Some of the @planetargon.com team got a chance to have a post-Rails World retro in Austin. Good vibes... and what a nice-looking bunch of humans.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 29/09/2026
wuts.wtf
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 28/09/2026
Looking through some of the photos from #RailsWorld 2026 now that I’m back home… with plenty to catch up on. Thanks again to everyone I got to spend some time talking with in Austin. And if you’d hoped we’d cross paths but we didn’t manage to… my email is easy enough to guess. Keep showing up.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 28/09/2026
Your agent can’t tell the difference between a pattern, an old pattern, an abandoned experiment, and something somebody copied six years ago and never touched again. To the agent, it’s all equally plausible prior art. If there’s a right way to do something in your codebase, make it obvious.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 27/09/2026
Latest iOS. Honestly, this isn’t AI generated. This just happened. 😹
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 24/09/2026
Thanks for having me, #RailsWorld. Stay curious. Wonder. Unpack. Tinker. Share. And every once in a while… be a Q. wuts.wtf
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 22/09/2026
Early morning run along the river in Austin: dark and humid. 💦 #RailsWorld
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 20/09/2026
Packing for Rails World… More than two months ago, I started writing my keynote by disappearing into the forest near the Oregon coast for a few days. Just me, stacks of notecards, yellow notepads, a lot of trees… and some runs on the beach to let the ideas wander.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 18/09/2026
We’re just a few days away from Rails World in Austin. Looking forward to catching up with old friends, meeting some new ones, and revisiting Austin. It’s been a few years. I’ll be giving my keynote, “The Most Valuable Engineer Isn’t Shipping Features,” on Tuesday afternoon.
Illustrated portrait of Robby Russell holding a Rails World Austin 2026 tote bag inside Waterloo Records, wearing a tweed jacket, bow tie, and pin. A speech bubble reads, “See you next week in Austin, ActiveNerds.”
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 15/09/2026
Looking forward to Austin next week.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 11/09/2026
We’ve been working through a bunch of new features and updates for @ohmyz.sh lately. One of the latest: a new cooldown option for the updater. Our release strategy has always been pretty simple… git pull from the primary branch.
Code example showing an Oh My Zsh .zshrc configuration with automatic updates enabled and a 10-day update cooldown, which waits 10 days before pulling new commits.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 01/09/2026
ProTip: Task Claude Design to spin up a collection of Slack themes to share with your team or private group by feeding it your style guide.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 31/08/2026
Pronouns: tree/hugger
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 24/08/2026
24 years ago this week, @planetargon.com got started. This photo was taken around that time. You don’t have to know how something is going to pan out before you start. Sometimes you just start… and see where it takes you.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 24/08/2026
Photo of me as a kid... wishing I had more AA batteries on our camping trip in the Sierra Nevadas so I could listen to Dre's The Chronic on my Sony Discman.
Photo of Robby Russell, as a kid (around 12) wearing a San Francisco Giant's sweater, standing on a rock, in the mountains
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
...and at the end of the night, you get to clean up a big mess.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
take a few more goofy photos
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
..and at the end of the night... you can tell your friends to get home safe...
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
Pass out edibles...
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
Create really disturbing art installations in your guest bathroom
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
Be impressed with your wife's costumes
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
have an excuse to decorate your house
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
...or joke around...
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
You can even squeeze in a workout
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
Some photos from past years...
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
PSA: This week is an ideal time to invite all of your awesome adult friends over for a Halloween costume party. This will be our fifth consecutive year hosting one... we usually end up with 40-50 people who show up throughout the night. If you're lucky, your friends might dress up as you.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 06/08/2026
Nice hat. He's hand-delivered orders to my front door.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 20/07/2026
Hear me out
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 14/07/2026
Hey Ruby friends, PUMA 8... THE "OCHO" is available via @commitgoods.com
Robby Russell wearing "Puma 8: The OCHO" t-shirt
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 14/07/2026
The Uni-Ball ONYX micro. Still one of my favorite pens… mostly because they’re what my dad used at work. He’d occasionally bring me into the office with him, and while they had some early version of local email, there was still a lot of filling out forms and taking notes by hand.
Three uni-ball ONYX micro pens laying on an Oxford legal pad
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 14/07/2026
I always enjoy hearing how different Rails teams solve similar problems. Bryce Harlan joined me on On Rails to share how his team evolved a decade-old healthcare platform… including an interesting “Action Responders” pattern they built instead of reaching for GraphQL.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 10/07/2026
Panes are inevitable Suffering is optional #tmux Available via @commitgoods.com
Photo of Robby Russell wearing a tmux T-shirt with the slogan, "Panes are inevitable, Suffering is optional"
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 10/07/2026
Pretty disappointing to see Robby: Feral Mode pushing an Extended 3x Usage upsell. I thought this brand had principles.
A parody software upsell pop-up for “Robby: Feral Mode,” offering “Extended: 3× usage for you.” The card features a stylized black-and-red portrait of Robby, explanatory upgrade text, and a bright red button reading “Let’s make some chaos.”
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 26/06/2026
No fucking way. This smells like where modern hacking attempts are headed.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 24/06/2026
Dare me?
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 18/06/2026
When the uptime alerts return.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 16/06/2026
Panes are inevitable. #tmux Now available on @commitgoods.com
Photo of the new tmux shirt available on Commit Goods showing the tmux logo and the text "Panes are inevitable. Suffering is optional."
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 15/06/2026
Be lazy.
Example of an Alfred auto-expand snippet to render the current date in a specific format
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 11/06/2026
...one of those days.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 10/06/2026
YTD
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 05/06/2026
That wasn't sustainable... so I got a bigger. Nov, 2006. Note: The ATARI Pinball glass was given to me by my grandfather, who worked in the early 80s.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 05/06/2026
Four months later... chaos.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 05/06/2026
My desk at the @planetargon.com HQ in March 2006. Timbuk2 bags, flip phone, MBP, business cards, wired mouse, a cigar box filled with blank index cards, whiteboard, 43 folders (GTD), an actual inbox
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 04/06/2026
Joining the 300K @lastfm.bsky.social scrobble club in a moment. Decided that my 300,001st scrobble would be the same song that started my journey back in April of 2005.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 29/05/2026
This little nugget of code felt a bit too realistic. If you work with Ruby on Rails, the community survey is open again. Curious to see where things actually stand in 2026.
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Robby Russell @robbyonrails.com · 29/05/2026
Happy release day to all who observe. Worth a dedicated listen with good headphones on and no distractions.
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