/writing

Spatial Queries with SpatiaLite and Ruby on Rails

SpatiaLite is a great alternative to PostGIS/PostgreSQL if you want to stick to SQLite. Previously, we set up SpatiaLite in a simple demo application. To jog your memory, here’s what we’re building.

· 11 minute read

Getting Started with SpatiaLite on Ruby on Rails

Locations are easy, right? All you need are coordinates - longitude and latitude - and you can put things on a map. But once you need distances, intersections, containment checks, or anything more complicated than single points things get interesting quickly.

· 9 minute read

Pi is Vim for Agentic Coding

What I love about Vim is its simplicity. Yes, I’m serious. Everyone jokes about being unable to quit the editor, and about the steep learning curve, but I really do think that at its core, Vim is simple.

· 2 minute read

The Golden Age of Copy-Paste

I’ve been copy-pasting a lot of code recently. Not in the copy-from-stack-overflow-without-understanding-what-it-does kind of way, but in the deliberate, this-is-better-than-adding-a-dependency kind of way.

· 4 minute read

Custom Walker Menus with Lua

When I switched to Wayland early this year, I had to wave goodbye to my trusty Rofi and find a new application launcher. Enter Walker - a fast, customizable launcher that comes with a bunch of useful menus out of the box. The important bits - Desktop applications, file browsing, calculator - are all there.

· 5 minute read

One Version to Rule Them All

Managing different tools in your modern Ruby on Rails application can be a pain. You definitely use Ruby. You probably use Node, and some package manager - npm, pnpm or whatever - to go along with it. Locally, managing versions for all these tools is made easy by tools like Mise or ASDF.

· 3 minute read

Ruby on Rails, Claude Code and Worktrees

Here’s how I use Claude Code to develop Ruby on Rails applications. Mostly medium sized ones that have been around for a while. No green-field, everything-is-possible, agents-go-wild vibe coding for me. I’ll leave that to others.

· 3 minute read

Multi Select with Hotwire Combobox

Recently, I put some work into lowering the barrier to contributing talks to RubyEvents. Not entirely out of the kindness of my heart, I might add. As the organizer of the Vienna.rb Ruby Meetup, I contribute talk recordings every couple of months.

· 3 minute read

Customizing Solr Highlighting with Sunspot

Need full-text text search in your web app? You don’t have to use Elasticsearch. There are alternatives. Even in 2025, some will refuse to switch to Elasticsearch, preferring to use venerable tools such as Solr instead.

· 1 minute read

Porting a Ruby Gem to the browser with ruby.wasm

When I built a small Ruby command-line tool - Tints ‘N Shades - I wondered: What does it take to run this library in the browser? Can it be done? Should it be done? It is pretty cool to make Ruby libraries available to play around with in the browser, after all.

· 4 minute read