iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

The number of git commit messages I've seen cursing out safari for its perpetual miscreant behaviour is incredibly high.

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Benn Jordan @bennjordan.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Imagine having this job. I guess I'm pretty stoked to be pissing off the people who are actively making my country uninhabitable.

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Neil Lewis @neil-lewis.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

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Benn Jordan @bennjordan.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Imagine spending an amount of money that could solve American homelessness for 3-4 years on detention centers for people who are generally busy working, renting, parenting, and paying taxes.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

It's astonishing to me that we just so willingly gave up on being able to select text to copy in so many apps? Granted, the text selection on mobile has always been substandard, but the fact that so few apps allow selection of text in so many places is infuriating.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Every time I think a boolean is sufficient, some new feature pushes it toward an enum, or some kind of multiple timestamps. Every, damn, time

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

As annoying as this AWS outage has been, it's a warning signal to engineering teams across the globe that our reliance on monopolistic cloud providers is bad for business

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

I keep thinking about an interaction with one of the major ai tools recently: [me] How to do x? [llm] Have you tried y? [me] Ok, I just tried y, it didn't work. [llm] I see you tried y, that's how you fix x, what else can I help you with?

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tef @tef.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

in case you're not sure who dhh is, he's a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like "i am smarter than you" and "foreigners bad" rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast

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Molly Knight @mollyknight.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

what a humiliating way for don jr. to find out his dad sends birthday cards.

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Erika Hall @erikahall.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Eliminating the headphone jack did this to society.

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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

A thing I think we miss is that the “authoritarian playbook” isn’t a set of instructions authoritarians are reading from, it’s just a list of things that happen when narcissists get too much power.

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Phillip Ayoub @payoub.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Absolutely incredible turnout for Budapest Pride! So proud of all the organizers, including some old friends, who estimate hundreds of thousands— major embarrassment to Orban

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Starting to lose count of the number of times I spin up a new app to try out a new JS framework, and realize that I really prefer vanilla JS, and that their abstraction is too much mental overhead for my productivity

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

With tariffs throwing international shipping into chaos, it’s only a matter of time before the toilet paper wars return right?

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Trusting in your web framework’s magic is like swiping a credit card, smooth and effortless upfront, but the bill always arrives. Sometimes when your app scales, other times just when you color outside the lines

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todor @todoralexandrov.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Meets JD Vance. Dies hours later. My guess is the Pope was unable to overcome that level of stupidity.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Why do get the feeling the next decade of software engineering is just gonna be cleaning up the crusty spaghetti left behind by someone who 'vibe coded' their way into production at 2am in an over-caffeinated stupor?

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Melbourne Airport: Agent: "Your carry-on is over the limit, that will be $42." Man: "Why is that so important? It’s only just over." Agent: "We need to stay under the weight, this is very important to the safety of your flight." Man: "It can’t be that important if you’re not weighing us!"

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Blue sky nice ghost @rajandelman.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

Bumper sticker that says, "Bought after the pedo diver thing... during the Grimes thing... you know what, this is on me. My bad"

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

After converting a personal project to Hanami, it blows my mind how elegantly it solves many issues I've faced with other frameworks. Bravo! I'm going to have to migrate some much larger projects over

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

As much as I love the aesthetics of symbol keys in a ruby hash, the mix of symbols and strings in ruby hashes in different projects can be a genuine nightmare. Pick a lane people!

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

[open source repo with zero updates for 6 months] "Clearly abandonware!" [personal repo with zero updates for 4 years] "This is fine."

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Richard Vallée @richardvallee.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

It's rarely pointed out, but no country in history has ever willingly given up as much power and influence as the USA just did. Nation states crave power and influence. They seek to build it, and work hard at not losing any. But here the US is going hog wild on losing as much of it as possible.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

We often judge a company's success by its profits and stock price, but most people probably care more about its minimum and median wages. After all, if planning on spending money there, it's good to know you're not just contributing to income inequality.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

My nvim LSP has been broken for a week now, and honestly? I haven’t rushed to fix it. Turns out, there’s a certain serenity in coding without an overzealous autocomplete breathing down my neck. No little suggestions. No judgmental squiggly lines. Just me, code, and occasional linting issue in PR's

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

One underrated perk of living in the EU: when most of your app's users are in the US, you can deploy while they’re asleep. Rails update? Ruby update? No problem, something breaks, you’ve got time to revert before anyone notices.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

The more time I spend running sql queries the more I realize that the boolean column is almost always a mistake. visible, enabled, active should almost always be a datetime: marked_visible_at, marked_enabled_at, marked_active_at

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Replacing ActiveStorage with Shrine in our main app. ActiveStorage's variant handling in the db is overly complex, and our app relies heavily on variants. Shrine is a pure joy so far, loving the switch!

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Sometimes I get super stoked at how few dependencies we have on our main production rails app, then deployments fail and I see the whole slew of CI and deployment dependencies

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

I love rails, but I also love javascript. Sometimes it feels like the framework has done everything in its power to not embrace it.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Every year around this time, I'm amazed that the same person who created some of the greatest songs ever also managed to write what is objectively the worst Christmas song, and a contender for one of the worst songs of all time.

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Almost hit 60 books this year. Highlights: Current: NEXUS by Yuval Noah Harari The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Classics: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons Fantasy: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree Percepliquis by Michael J. Sullivan

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Stripe’s developer experience vs. PayPal’s is almost comical: Me: "Hey, can I get all refunds from the past year with transaction details?" Stripe: "Sure, here you go!" PayPal: "Nope. Only 31 days at a time, special permissions needed, and good luck finding docs!"

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

I much prefer multi-word Ruby gem names to be hyphenated rather than camel cased, even though camel case seems to be more common

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Taking the week to improve test coverage on our main app and manage to discover the origin of an intermittent bug we've been hunting for years!

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I find it interesting how many Rails projects end up being RDD, Rubocop Driven Design. Entire days of development time can go into refactoring just to satisfy the linter

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ceej @ceej.online · 05/12/2024

who's gonna build me atproto instagram, man? every single interaction in that app sucks to use. you can actively feel zuckerberg fighting you whenever you try to do anything other than look at brands

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

My biggest takeaway from 2024? Apparently, I’m a "light mode" text editor guy now. Apologies to everyone I silently judged for this in the past

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

2024 has been the year of culling dependencies. I’ve removed more gems and packages from our app this year than ever. It usually starts with, "What do we even use this for?" and ends with replacing it with a simple class. Rinse and repeat. Here’s to more of the same in 2025!

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

I wish github were more context aware: "You're merging into main and deploying close to a holiday or a weekend. Want to auto-create a revert PR, just in case?"

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

You open the "legacy" Rails app for the first time and find models full of callbacks—ugh. Then you see those callbacks packed with conditionals—double ugh. So this is why callbacks are so maligned!

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

This year, I finally got our main prod app to use jemalloc, and the memory savings are incredible. Along with a few other optimizations, our AWS bill is now 33% of what it was last year. I’m not a fan of DevOps, and any day NOT spent in AWS is a good day, but I almost enjoyed this work

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Toby @tobyond.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Some days, I wish I had a time machine to share lotto numbers with my past self. Other days, I’d use it to warn past me not to go all in with Hotwire, split the front end with more JavaScript, and maybe even (gasp) pick a JS framework for the complex pages. Today is a day for the latter

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