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kigsteron The only leverage that scales in 2026 is Taste written down

PostgreSQL skill file, as a blog post, based on twenty years building and scaling apps on PostgreSQL.

kigsteron Why Traditional Testing Doesn't Work for AI Applications

And a related article summarizing latest research in the area:

https://kig.re/2026/06/22/ai-digest-on-evals.html

kigsteron Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

Ruby's performance as a function of infrastructure cost was largely fixed back with Ruby 2.2. Today it's even faster and uses less memory.

The performance problems were 99% invalid database usage, poor or overly aggressive pre-emptive indexing, or bad active record usage.

Developers lacked education in basic database design, and given rails made it do easy, yes that resulted in a lot of slow code and overloaded RDS instances.

But it was entirely possible to build highly scaling rails apps back in 2012. When I ran Wanelo's engineering team we squeezed 300K+ rpm's on a relatively small cloud foot print. It has since been migrated to Heroku.

kigsteron Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

I am in the same boat, but jumping back. Folks at the non ruby company all had fond memories of rails apps and missed the simplicity. The tangled mess of TypeScript was a disaster codebase with massive tech debt.

kigsteron Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

> Will Ruby make a comeback?

I don't know, but I certainly hope so. I started building web apps in Rails in 2007 and rode the wave till 2020, when I joined a company that ran on TypeScript, Go, and Haskell. I've since left said company.

There are several things that Rails got exceptionally "right":

- code generation that included test templates

- active record was much simpler than Hibernate

- a super dense and all powerful meta-programming enabled language behind the scenes (ruby is arguably the most compact and human readable language out there).

- rubygems was always robust, but is now mostly complete packaging platform.

But most importantly IMHO people back in 2007 started launching super hot looking Ajaxy apps on Rails, that turned up the heat and drew attention to Rails. There was a new coolness about how Basecamp worked, and early Twitter. It was all self updating and magical. And that's how the web app development should be.

Today, nodejs is no match in productivity or testing practices, TypeScript is a huge mess, and the cost is going to surface in the coming years as todays apps shift into maintenance and less development.

Once we have enough apps in maintenance mode in all four: ruby, Django, Go, and Larvel we'll see who wins the long term game.

Devs always want to work on the new shiny tech whether or not it's the best choice. This is because few do the exercise of identifying what they are optimizing for: dev speed, app reliability, or massive scale.

I am actually going back to the Rails/Ruby ecosystem, and will report here when I find a good spot.

How can we make Ruby come back? By introducing it into the stacks of companies as CLI tools, or mini services. I maintain ruby rules for Bazel build system, for instance, and my hope is that it will help support Ruby as a first class citizen within corp monorepos.

kigsteron Do you code complex Arduino projects? Use Arli to search/install libs

Really, I’m looking for any feedback using this tool to manage Arduino libraries for any project. I do not use their Aweful IDE, and much prefer Clion, although CMake is its own beast :)

I hit a wall while building a project with more than ten libraries, and so having to keep track of them all by hand, download and manually rename the folders, has been a nightmare.

Arli solves that by reading an Aifile - a yaml file that can see supplied with any project. Arli then installs all libs in the proper locations, while also figuring out the name of the library folder.

kigsteron Dead-simple symmetric encryption with *sym*, with password-protected keys and more

Looking for any feedback, suggestions, or discussion. Thanks!

kigsteron Pure-Ruby solution for a highly scalable Redis-backed social activity feeds

Github URL is here: https://github.com/kigster/simple-feed and the ruby gem is here: https://rubygems.org/gems/simple-feed

kigsteron Warp Directory (wd) unix command line tool for any shell written in ruby

       wd add proj   # add current directory as a warp point
       cd ~/
       wd proj       # jumps to proj
       wd list       # lists all points
       wd rm proj    # removes proj

kigsteron Announcing LaserCutter ruby gem and MakeABox.IO web site

Uh oh, you mean the blog post? I just fixed one of them, but couldn't find the second. Hopefully it did not distract you from reading the post, and you were able to focus on the content too :)

As a non-native English speaker differentiating between "its" and "it's" has been a bit of a challenge, but I do appreciate whenever an error is pointed out as it allows me to correct it now and be more attentive in the future.

kigsteron Announcing LaserCutter ruby gem and MakeABox.IO web site

Thanks for the kind words, I too think that laser-cutter combined with maple wood is sort of like a home cooked meal :)

I haven't actually gotten into 3D printing, and I find laser-cutting much less intimidating, because you are dealing with 2D at all times. Of course it has it's limitations, but you can build very complex 3D structures out of 2D cut-out objects.

kigsteron Choosing The Right Arduino IDE

I am sorry if you are not productive in Eclipse, perhaps compared to other tools. I write software every day, and Eclipse ended allowing me to have the highest productivity of all tools I surveyed in the blog post. I wanted to write a simple robot automation library, and I was struggling at every step with other tools, but with Eclipse I was able to get going very quickly and build, refactor, test my code rapidly. This is what I've been looking for, this is what native Arduino IDE did not provide, and so I wrote a post about it :) Pure and simple.

kigsteron Choosing The Right Arduino IDE

Thanks for pointing out inotool.org – i didn't know it existed, and it looks pretty cool.

One big wish I have is to find a way to write automated tests for my Arduino libraries. Or even for pure C/C++ classes used by my libraries, but I havent' yet invested into setting up Eclipse to build/run tests with an Arduino type project. Curious to know if anyone has a solution to automated testing of Arduino and pure C/C++ libs that are used by their Arduino code?

Regarding the other remark below – nobody is doing it wrong as long as they are doing it. The post is a personal opinion, and should be taken as such. If Qt Creator works better for you, great! Write a blog post about it ;)

kigsteron Google rejects White House request to pull Mohammad film clip

I think it's a mistake to say "employee was killed because of the video". They were killed because of barbaric rules that extreme version of Islam promotes, and those who take it seriously enough to blow themselves up and other people. I applaud Google.