ruby.im

How we build and run software here: Ruby first, open and self-hosted, written down for the people and the coding agents who work on it.

Ruby and Rails

• Ruby-aligned thinkers: specific ideas, practical uses and honest differences, now with what our collections say
• Why Ruby: the best language for people and language models
• The Rails mindset: DHH, convention over configuration, and the ideas behind Rails
• Caching in Rails: best practices, summarized from Nate Berkopec's guide
• Ruby and C: when Ruby is the bottleneck, hand the hot path to C

Building apps

• Consent engineering: channel rules, provider practices and a proposed Rails evidence and suppression ledger
• Government accessibility, standards and Ruby: US federal and state/local requirements, UK/EU context, design systems and testing
• Browser-first, Ruby-first: four parts on standards, device compute, offline data and safe Rails synchronization
• Ruby applications in the browser: a WebAssembly proposal with explicit compatibility and storage boundaries
• Identity: multitenant orgs and rooftops, enterprise single sign-on, and passkeys with YubiKeys
• Secrets: how we keep API keys and tokens, with Bitwarden behind an adapter
• Services: email, SMS, push, card billing and S3 storage, each behind an adapter, with direct uploads
• Testing: earn confidence, don't assume it; 160 standards, a release gate, and rules for AI-written code
• Retrieval-augmented generation: a RAG system that cites page numbers, with hybrid search, reranking, grounding, a golden eval set and a benchmark against naive RAG
• Ilya Sutskever's reading list: the 27 papers said to come from his list for John Carmack, what each teaches, and how much of the attribution holds up
• Software as an instrument: turning UX laws into instructions a coding agent can test, where they backfire, and 44 principles drawn from Bell Labs, the Model M and Icom and Yaesu radios
• Made to be kept: what the Model M, ThinkPads, the MacBook Air and the Yaesu VX-5R share with a Casio watch and a moka pot, from 2,337 owner comments and the research on attachment, and how to make software people keep

Running it

• Scaling web apps: Cal Henderson, our editorial patron saint, six platform blueprints and a practical Rails checklist
• Twelve-factor apps: config in the environment, logs to stdout, stateless processes
• Own your stack: open source, platform agnostic, self-hosted, and no provider lock-in
• Observability: usage, performance and errors for everything we run, in one place · live dashboard (sign-in required)
• Hardware: what our machine can do for local AI, where it runs out, and upgrades and mods with their risks
• Open AI interfaces: open-source chat interfaces, and a threads workspace for Claude Code, Codex, Jev and future models that watches trends and proposes its own features
• Films made in code: an AI motion director that renders finished films in code, every frame a function of its number, checked by a critic that did none of the building

About

• AGENTS.md: updated 20 October 2026 — Ruby-first engineering, browser accessibility, source rights, reviewed releases and instrument-grade interfaces. Download the guide.
• instrument-design.md: interface rules for coding agents, with a check for each, from Software as an instrument. Download.
• Changelog: every change to this site, newest first

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