IRB.send :easter_egg, :dancing

💬 Writing

I write about Ruby and related programming topics at mattbrictson.com/blog. Here are some articles I’ve posted recently:

• Upgrading to PostgreSQL 17 with Homebrew
• Building a better bin/dev script
• Build a modal form with Rails, Turbo, and the dialog element
• How to organize CSS in a Rails project
• Advanced techniques for calling HTTP APIs in Ruby

🧑‍💻 Projects

I’m currently working on:

bundle_update_interactive – I’ve created a popular interactive mode for Bundler, inspired by yarn upgrade-interactive, and continue to add features based on community involvement.

nextgen – I regularly update a Rails app generator with recommendations based on my latest Rails consulting work. Nextgen embraces the fact that every project has different requirements, and offers dozens of interactive options, including Vite for apps that need robust TS/React frontends.

tomo – This is my take on a modern alternative to Capistrano for deploying Rails apps. It focuses on a friendly developer experience: familiar SSH concepts, an intuitive CLI, well-documented extension points, and helpful error messages. I use tomo to deploy many of my side projects.

Other Ruby open source projects that I’ve built and continue to support:

• mighty_test is a refined CLI for Minitest that adds color output, fail-fast, CI integration, and interactive watch mode.
• pgcli-rails plugs into Rails apps to replace the default database console with the more full-featured pgcli.
• gem is the GitHub template I use for building and maintaining gems.

🪴 Maintenance

I also serve as a core contributor and maintainer for the following Ruby projects:

• capistrano
• capistrano/rails
• capistrano/bundler
• sshkit
• plist
• minitest-snapshots