iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 19/02/2026

Por coincidência, ontem tava relendo um review que escrevi sobre o livro "The Secret Life of Programs" e o autor tem uma visão interessante sobre a diferença entre coding, programacao, eng., e CS... por essa definicão, eng. de soft. não mudaria, talvez os níveis acima: www.tonysm.com/the-secret-l...

A piece of a review I wrote about the book "The Secret Life of Programs". This piece is talking about the difference between coding, programming, engineering, and computer science. Here's the copy:

"The difference between coding, programming, engineering, and computer science is also really good:

- Coding: the knowledge of some codes to make certain things (being able to "make the text bold" in an HTML page). Usually, a coder is proficient in one special area (HTML or JS, for instance);
- Programming: knowing more than one special area or two;
- Engineering: the next step up in complexity. To quote the author "in general, engineering is the art of taking knowledge and using it to accomplish something";
- Computer science: the study of computing. Often, programming is mixed up with computer science. Many computer scientists are programmers, but not all programmers are computer scientists. Discoveries in this field are used by engineering and programmers.

The author also makes an interesting comparison with doctors regarding generalists vs specialists. He says that in medicine a specialist is a generalist that picks one area to specialize. Whilst in programming, a specialist is someone that knows a particular area, but usually doesn't have a general understanding of the whole picture. He would prefer our field to be more like the medical field. I found this comparison interesting. It aligns with the idea of the T-shaped skills."

Source is in the link mentioned in the post.

000

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 01/01/2026

Nice! It felt pretty unreal over here today too.

Sunset in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil. The image shows an almost purple sky.

120

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 04/12/2025

Fizzy source code is amazing. All I expected from a Vanilla Rails app. Regular controllers, regular models. No fancy architecture. It uses import maps and vanilla CSS, so all we need to run it locally is Ruby. The app is very colorful and vibrant, view transitions make it feel so good. Hotwire FTW.

A screenshot of the terminal running `bundle exec rails stats`. It shows a bunch of useful stats on the Fizzy application, such as number of controllers (87), rate of methods per class on controllers (3), number of models (63), rate of methods per class on models (8), etc.

Screenshot of the Card class on Fizzy. The modules are the most interesting part to me.

Screenshot of the cards controller. Just a regular Rails controller, nothing fancy (that's the idea).

281

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 15/11/2024

New video: Let's add an @-mentions feature to our Trix editor using the Rich Text Laravel package! youtu.be/0nehAcGa6DI?...

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#08: User Mentions" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

031

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 09/11/2024

And another video is out! This time a really quick one about how we can disable the submit buttons when there are pending attachments on the Trix editor! youtu.be/B72yvgIacT4

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#07: Disable Submits When Pending Attachments" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

110

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 07/11/2024

New video is out! Let's see how we could enhance the typing experience a bit. We'll add keyboard shortcuts to some toolbar items, like lists and headings, and then we'll also see how one could implement a markdown-inspired typing experience on Trix. youtu.be/RsgFzlRskPU

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#06: Markdown-inspired typeing behavior" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

131

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 04/11/2024

New video is out! Let's implement our attachments using the MediaLibrary package. youtu.be/82rZMVu6Trg

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#05: Attachments & Media Library" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

120

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 01/11/2024

A new video on the "Rich Text Laravel Series" is out: let's implement attachments! youtu.be/fDMpSQz85Xs

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#04: Simple Attachments" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

140

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 01/11/2024

It's pretty cool that we can use the events on Trix to add custom typing experiences, like this markdown-inspired quick formatting:

130

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 30/10/2024

A new video on this series is out! Let's see how we can style the Trix toolbar to match our theme. There are different ways we could go about styling it, I chose one that allows us to use Tailwind classes and custom toolbar button components. youtu.be/chID75grPIE

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#03: Styling the Toolbar" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

130

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 28/10/2024

In the previous video, we intentionally introduced an XSS attack vector by not escaping the HTML to keep it short. But we'll fix it with HTML Sanitization in this one! That's why they're releasing simultaneously. youtu.be/lUav1FRaaU8

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#02: HTML Sanitization" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

110

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 28/10/2024

Continuing the series, today I've released two videos. In the first one, we'll install the package in an existing Laravel application, migrate existing data into it, and then turn on rich text attributes encryption to keep it encrypted at rest. youtu.be/jbsJYu4lWY4

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "#01: Installation" is highlighted with a subheading "Rich Text Laravel Series". Tony is standing next to the title.

110

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 26/10/2024

I promised a video series on Trix & Laravel, and I only started working on it a few days ago. Here's the first video where I walkthrough the Workbench app inside the Rich Text Laravel package and dive into oembeds (which is based on Campfire): youtu.be/M0Z9WFbY-8U?... More videos coming!

Thumbnail of the linked video. There's a huge Trix editor in the back with copy inside from their website. The title "Rich Text Laravel: #series" is highlighted. Tony is standing next to the title.

3175

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 02/09/2024

While source-diving on Basecamp and HEY's front-end for a little bit, I noticed they're using this Duet Date Picker lib. It's such a nice lib, it uses Web Components and all that, so I documented how I could use it myself in my apps: world.hey.com/tonysm/the-d...

A Laravel app using Turbo Laravel and using the Duet date picker lib. The date picker matches the app color.

001

Tony Messias @tonysm.com · 02/09/2024

I've released a new version of Turbo Laravel with a convenient way to create Turbo Streams using the new `[method="morph"]` attribute. Morphing enables a more fluid page update experience using CSS transitions. Check out this blog post: world.hey.com/tonysm/turbo-streams-…

Example of a Turbo Stream update action using the new `->morph()` method, which adds a `[method="morph"]` to the generated Turbo Stream tag.

040