flats

Senior Software Engineer

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.

Willing to relocate: probably not.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Max/MSP, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs.

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: dave@robador.com

https://robador.com/daf

Yes, typing would obviate the need for the sorts of extensive unit testing I'm talking about here. I feel that. Luckily, the frontier LLMs (especially Claude) have gotten _really_ good at writing Rspec...

Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.

I have had similar experiences & we are not alone: https://bytecode.hr/posts/why-ruby-is-the-better-language-fo....

There are indeed so many compelling arguments against using Ruby these days (e.g. performance, type safety, an increasingly small user base), & yet I continue to reach for it because of this effortless expressiveness (& the maturity of the ecosystem).

Senior Software Engineer

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.

Willing to relocate: probably not.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: dave@robador.com

https://robador.com/daf

I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.

It still blows my mind that this is the same company.

I absolutely agree with you.

Also, some folks seem to be forgetting the virtues of boring, time-tested platforms & technologies in their rush to embrace the new & shiny & vibe-***ed. & also forgetting to thoroughly read documentation. It’s not terribly surprising to me that an “AI-first” infrastructure company might make these sorts of questionable design decisions.

One does not even need OpenClaw to achieve this outcome: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

Absolutely yes, all over the place! Startups are building greenfield software with Rails as we speak. Loads of established businesses have Ruby applications that are quietly chugging along doing their jobs well. & Shopify, a company with $1.6 billion in annual revenue, uses Ruby _very_ heavily & also invests in the wider Ruby ecosystem.

Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it’s elegant in a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately) unexciting in the best way.

That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!

I was very skeptical of these plans at first—as a New Yorker, I don’t exactly have a lot of trust in our city’s government to run things well.

But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.

It’s the complete disregard of typesetting in ebooks that has always repelled me. I fundamentally reject the notion that all books can be reduced to text files. Design matters!

I live in a section of Brooklyn (the "flat south section" per this fantastically detailed Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lettered_Brooklyn_aven...) in which the avenues (which run east to west, like Bogotá's calles) are lettered. Some of them, mostly early in the alphabet, were named or renamed in this same way (Albemarle, Beverly, Cortelyou, Ditmas, and so on). The streets running north/south are numbered.

(Interestingly, Avenue Q was renamed Quentin Road to avoid confusion with Avenue O.)

Either way, lettered or named in alphabetical order, I appreciate the lettered/numbered combination. It's a good mix of character and practicality, and it sounds good when you say it out loud ("It's at E 14th and K"). The doubly numbered intersections of Queens always drive me nuts.

A final sidenote: some real estate developers in the early 20th century decided to rename sections of E 11th through 16th from Prospect Park South down through West Midwood to fancy-sounding anglicized names like Stratford, Westminster, Argyle, Rugby, and Marlborough (the SWARM backronym here is useful) so they could make more money selling homes on those streets. It worked. Yet another example of nefarious street naming...

I agree with almost all of this, & yes, retreats can be life-changing. They certainly have been for me!

However, I do not understand this comment:

For the Soto Zen and Vipassana traditions, practice is everything - not philosophy, opinion, or behavior.

Right action is an essential element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I have myself found the teachings concerning behavior to be a central element of my practice as I have gone deeper with the dhamma.

I don’t think it counts as NIMBYism if you don’t want it in yours or anybody’s backyard, ever. I would describe that as principled opposition.

Also, what happens when we don’t need such enormous data centers anymore? How many communities in the U.S. are saddled with enormous dead malls while the developers walk away with zero liability?

Came here for this, thank you. I knew I’d seen this sort of thing before.

Curation feels better with this implementation?

Interesting—this feels like a very “engineering manager” sort of observation that isn’t actually all that generalizable.

My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).

I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.

I’m currently working on a sequencer DAW plug-in (MIDI, audio) with multiple voices & precise timing/articulation controls, including a templating system & transformations to apply these changes to several steps/voices at the same time. Will also support importing/exporting tempo maps.

Can be used for everything from slightly skewed beat-making to generating undulating waves of sound!

+1, Max for the rapid prototyping & flexible control, Csound for its concision & high fidelity.

I don’t believe this is true? I’m pretty sure that you’re prohibited from making money from that fan fiction, not from writing it at all. So I don’t understand the claim that copyright “massively stifles” creativity. There are of course examples of people not being able to make money on specific “ideas” because of copyright laws, but that doesn’t seem to me to be “massively stifling” creativity itself, especially given that it also protects and supports many people generating these ideas. And if we got rid of copyright law, wouldn’t we be in that exact place, where people wouldn’t be allowed to make money off of creative endeavors?

I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire.

That, to me, sucks.

Thank you! It was really helpful to be reminded of this truth such an unexpected context. I am finally beginning to grab that “ordinary person’s life” & getting there has indeed been _the path_.

May we all get there & be free of suffering.

Very well put. I’m open to a future in which nothing is copyrighted & everything is in the public domain, but the byproduct of that public domain material should _also_ be owned by the public.

Otherwise, we’re making the judgement that the originators of the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training & resources required to make the art in the first place.

Strongly agree. I don't see how this post in any way deserves flagging based on the guidelines. Is there no karmic penalty for false flags?

I feel you on a lot of this! But out of the box Python support? Does anybody actually want that? It’s pretty darn quick & straightforward to get a Python environment up & running on MacOS. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here.

this should be on a wall somewhere

As opposed to using JavaScript on the front end & back end? That benefit of JS has always seemed a bit overrated to me—the context for front-end & server-side JS is pretty darn different, too.

Anyway, Ruby & Rails are such a joy to use that, at least for me, the fact that it’s written in a different language than the one we need in the browser is a non-issue.

Feel you on the entry-level features making people worried that Apple is prosumer-izing their baby. I worry about that sometimes.

Yes, Max is amazing. Thanks for sharing your instruments! Sidewinder looks particularly cool.

I also got into building in there for a while (& still do sometimes), though not specifically M4L: https://github.com/flats/max-instruments. Even wrote a couple of externals back in the day.

What I _really_ want is some sort of a hybrid between a DAW and something like Csound—fully graphical but also fully scriptable/automatable. Live w/ M4L is _kinda_ close, but we’re not quite there yet…

I think we both have a lot of room for being wrong! There seem to be no reliable sources for DAW market share, and I imagine all of these companies consider it in their interests to keep the number of active users of their software to themselves. So anything I have to say here is purely anecdotal.

From my vantage point (Brooklyn-based creative music-maker regularly recording & performing), it’s a growing market and both Ableton _and_ Logic are doing pretty well. Ableton has some obvious strengths—its scene-based workflow & M4L in particular—but it’s also got a very opinionated UI & is a bit less intuitive/fluid for editing (at least from my perspective as a Logic user!). I know many people who use Logic to make creative music that involves both live recording and electronic instruments, and a lot of those people have switched away from Pro Tools because of its hideous UI, the subscription pricing, & the annoyance of iLok. I even know several professional, touring musicians who perform with MainStage & swear by it.

In other words, I think that Logic has found a pretty broad audience of creative musicians who straddle the songwriting & electronic music worlds (which is more & more people every day).

What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.

Definitely hoping that Gruber is wrong here & Logic stays the fantastic loss-leader it’s been for the last decade or so.

What leads you to believe that Logic has been shedding users? What little information I can find on this suggests that Logic has in fact been growing slightly & has significant market share. I also think it’s a huge driver of Mac sales.

I work with Ruby every day at work & have always been curious about Crystal. This was a very helpful dive into some overarching concepts & small details. Thanks for sharing!