Steve Klabnik

As you know, I've been doing a lot of work over the last few years to keep _why's Shoes project going. A few other intrepid individuals have been doing a lot as well. We're starting to work on Shoes 4...

I spend an unusually large amount of time thinking about interactions between what I call 'past me' and 'future me.' It seems that my life changes significantly every few years, and I like to ground m...

Walking down the street, a woman cries for help. She's blind, and the curb is large, and she's unsure of herself. Knowing it's not safe, she seeks the help of a stranger to guide her on her way. Three...

Hey everyone! It's been a few weeks, and I wanted to update you guys on the card situation.First of all, thank you so much. Every single one of you who sent cards, thank you! It was truly amazing to s...

So I said I was gonna build antisocialne.ws. But I'm changing gears instead: I'd rather do this project, which has a better spec and needs a reference implementation.<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.c...

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People are often surprised to find out that I identify as an anti-capitalist. At least in America, many people see capitalism as inevitable, or even as the way things always were. Unfortunately, there...

Hey everyone. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I've been a bit absent lately. Basically, my dad has angiosarcoma. It's a really rare cancer of the blood vessels. A city the size of Pittsb...

I'm so very close to releasing the beta of Get Some REST. However, I'm about to get on a plane to Poland, and that's a bad time to launch things. ;) wroc_love.rb, here I come!Anyway, I figured I'd gi...

Originally, this post was titled "A RESTful Reading List," but please note that REST is over. Hypermedia API is the new nomenclature.I've been doing an intense amount of research on Hypermedia APIs ov...

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I'd been thinking about doing this for a while, and yesterday, actually got around to it. The basic idea is this: record me during normal development, and then post it to the internet.Here's the video...

NOTE: The alpha of my book on APIs is out! Check it out at http://designinghypermediaapis.com.As I've done research on APIs for Designing Hypermedia APIs, I've become increasingly interested in differ...

Because I don't have enough gems made already, I made another one last night: metadown.What's Metadown do?This blog originally used Jekyll. When I moved it to my own personal blog implementation, I no...

I love both Sinatra and Rails, for different reasons. I've heard a few different heuristics for which framework would be better for your application, but I'm not sure the answer is all that simple, re...

I'm a big fan of using the presenter pattern to help separate logic from presentation. There's a great gem named Draper that can help facilitate this pattern in your Rails apps. When doing research fo...

It is practically impossible to teach OO design to students that have had a prior exposure to Rails: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.Edsger W. Dijkstra...

It's true.If you haven't used it yet, Redcarpet is the Markdown parser that GitHub uses to work all that magic on their site. So of course, it's awesome.You can use it and abuse itWhat makes it really...

The other day, I was working on some Cucumber features for a project, and I discovered a neat technique that helps you to write better Cucumber steps.Nobody wants to be cuking it wrong, but what does ...

<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> An aside for software devsYou might not care about anarchism, and I can almost guarantee that you don't care about Marx, but ...

If you haven't used it, CanCan is a great library for Rails that handles authorization for you. Its calling card is simplicity; just do this:class Ability include CanCan::Ability def initialize(u...

Just a quick note about Devise, and its RESTful implications. I ran across this error today, and thought I'd share.I was trying to log out, so I hit the normal route for such things with my browser. H...

Disclaimer: I do have a small credit in this book. A long time ago, the author mentioned that he was looking for people to help out, so I stepped up. It was only participating in discussions like "Wha...

I have a confession to make: Other than one little stint at RubyC, I haven't really written code in almost a month. And I haven't really written a 'real' blog post in almost six weeks.It happens. I wa...

No, seriously. This is a public service announcment to all MBAs who want to do startups: 'platform' does not mean 'web site.'I know that 'platform' is a hot thing right now. But seriously, the term ha...

Yep. Doin' it. This morning I swung by the Sprint store and picked up a 4G hotspot. Gonna transfer my number to Google Voice this evening.lolwhut?Yep. I'm terribly addicted to my phone right now. This...

You walk into work tomorrow morning, and your boss says this:Boss: Hey, we're gonna need to go ahead and have you implement require_relative in rubinius. We have some new servers coming in, and we'll ...

I finally got to see Zach Holman give his talk, How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub. It was awesome. Zach is a great speaker, and the slides don't do it justice. I highly recommend catching it on v...

I came across a blog post the other day titled Modern Ruby Development. While it's a perfectly fine blog post (other than the digs at rvm...) it really should have been titled something more along the...

Well, it's the end of the web as we know it. I'd already been thinking about this all weekend, and last night, I decided. I just can't deal with Facebook's crazy privacy stuff anymore. I mean, I alrea...

Hey everyone! I just wanted to share One More Thing with you about this rstat.us refactoring.The main thrust of the last article I posted was to show you a technique for extracting a class, getting it...

Hey everyone! We've been doing a lot of refactoring on rstat.us lately, and I wanted to share with you a refactoring that I did. It's a real-world example of doing the domain models concept that I've ...

My last blog post caused a bit of a stir in some circles. I got a bunch of emails. Apparently, I need to expand on a few things. So here we go. Let's rap about the Presenter pattern, shall we?No serio...

UPDATE: I also have a follow-up here.I often tell people that I learned Ruby via Rails. This is pretty much the worst way to do it, but I'd learned so many programming languages by then that it didn't...

By now, the pomodoro technique is pretty well-known amongst programmers. I forget where I heard of it first, but if you haven't, here it is: Break your day up into 30 minute chunks. Work for 25 minute...

Okay! So, if you'd read my previous article on this, you'd know how easy it is to contribute to Ruby's Documentaiton.But Steve, I'm still kinda scared.Okay, so here we go: I'm making it even easier on...

Rubyists have a saying, or at least, we used to. "Matz is nice so we are nice." This has sort of been lost over the years... some people who have been around Ruby for a long time still say this, but i...

Programmers like to think that software is the purest form of meritocracy. We like to consider ourselves scientists; what we do is entirely impersonal. I'm at Lone Star Ruby right now, and the first t...

This is a follow-up post to my post here. You probably want to read that first.UPDATE: Please note that 'REST is over'. 'Hypermedia API' is the proper term now.A few words on standards versus pragmati...

When I spoke on a panel at RTLM NY '11, I got a little rise out of the crowd when I said "Twitter is too important to be owned by Twitter." This is still absolutely true, and yesterday was a great exa...

HI HN, PLEASE READ THIS!!!Since I've posted this, I've refined a few of my positions on things. Everyone learns and grows, and while I still stand by most of what I said, I specifically don't agree th...

Hey everyone. Here's a draft of an essay I've been working on. I'd love to hear your feedback.The word 'engineering' has a deep connection to the word 'trade-offs' in my mind. Most engineering decisio...

Well well well, some things never change. Long ago, I hosted my own blog, and here we are again. I've moved everything over to Jekyll, if that means anything to you. You can now look at my blog on Git...

Update!I'm now making it even easier than this: Read my new post about how I'll do this for you. That said, if you want to do it yourself, the following will tell you how.Original ArticleRuby 1.9.3 is...

Hey everyone. A lot of people have been asking me about rstat.us lately, so I figured I'd tell a little bit of the story as it's gone down so far.StatsFirst, here's some numbers:Users: 4553 Uniques: 2...

Whew.If you've been following me on Twitter at all lately, you'll know that I've been working hard on a new project lately. Tonight, even though it's late, I'm finally getting it out there. Please wel...

I've heard Ruby Mendicant University (also known as RMU, not to confuse you Robert Morris alums!) described as "the best kept secret of the Ruby community." High praise, indeed. If you haven't heard ...

I've been thinking about this post for a while.I freaking love Hacker News. It's my favorite place on the Internet. It's incredibly valuable. I have learned so much from my time there.  With that said...

I've almost always been in a habit of reading. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time in the library. I'd just grab an entire series of novels, and read them all, right in a row. Sometimes I'd end ...

This year I'm happy to report that I have much more upbeat plans than last year's kind of sad post. With that said, here's my 2011 goals:I want to work for other people 2 days per week on average for ...

It's been a long journey. I have a lot to say about this, but it'll have to wait until I'm not in the middle of nowhere spending some time with Maria's family. I just wanted to tell you all Merry Chri...

I'll cut to the chase: I've stepped down as CTO of CloudFab. I don't want to discuss details, but life is too short to not be doing what you want with it. And, after a period of careful thought and co...

I find it incredibly hard not to be judgmental.I'm not sure what part of my personality makes this happen, but even when I try to curb tearing down other people, I end up doing it anyway. I'm not sure...

It's funny how true this quote is.There are three people that I really admire: _why, Zed Shaw, and Yehuda Katz. And to simplify my tenses a bit, I'll speak of _why in the present tense. What do these ...

So, Wednesday, Diaspora was released.If you're not familiar, a few months ago everyone was up in arms about the latest Facebook privacy change. So four college kids started a Kickstarter project with ...

Today is Whyday. A programmer's holiday. Today is the day that we don't forget that programming isn't all Agile and driven by behavior and Serious Business. Inside each cubicle, the hacker spirit is t...

Sometimes, insight comes from very unlikely places.I'm keenly interested in the music industry, and how it will evolve, or possibly die. I care deeply about music; it's had a profound effect on my lif...

Recently, it was brought up on Proggit that Chris Smith's "What to Know Before Debating Type Systems" was no longer online. This is a really great article, and in an effort to make sure it survives, I...

The other day I wrote a post about being excellent to each other. Today, I've got a great example of that for you: Divvy.What would you do if you received an email like this?![]3Here's what happened:!...

Right now, I'm having a bit of a 'darkness before the dawn' kind of moment. I feel like I might soon start to become productive again.It's sort of strange, how these things travel in waves. Just a mon...

I just saw this today. It kind of goes along with my "Move to the Internet" post from a few days ago.Enjoy.Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:16:35 +0100To: barlow@eff.orgFrom: John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org...

Pretty soon, Twitter is going to turn off Basic Authentication and switch entirely to OAuth. People are upset. It's natural. If apps aren't updated, they'll stop working, entirely. This could be bad.B...

I've been joking for a while that I'd like to "move to the Internet." Generally I cite my familiarity and love with online culture as opposed to American culture. I don't really care what's going on i...

I've been waiting for this book for a while. "Rework" is the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals. It hit stores on Tuesday. Here's a (non-affiliate) link to Rework on A...

Ever wonder why some websites are so addictive? Certain sites always keep you going back, time after time after time. Well, I can't speak for all of them, but there's a subtle reason that some sites d...

Sometimes, when responding to a support request, it's nice to see what your users see. At the same time, you don't want to ask your users for their passwords, out of respect for their privacy. So what...

Kanye West posted something interesting about the nature of creativity today. I'm going to make a copy of it here, because I find the presentation also interesting. Here's his post, for reference.![]2...

I bet social psychologists are having a field day with the Internet. I know nothing about the field, so I don't know if there are thousands of papers about it already written or not, but there should ...

For those of you that don't know, I've taken over a project by someone named _why. He dropped off of the face of the Internet back in March, and the community has picked up his works. Because I'll be ...

For those of you that don't know, I've taken over a project by someone named _why. He dropped off of the face of the Internet back in March, and the community has picked up his works. Because I'll be ...