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I've been doing design long enough to see a lot of my tools disappear.

I used to deliver all prototypes and mockups from Sketch (and Photoshop before that) into InVision. They shut down the design collaboration services at the end of 2024, and their Freehand product went to Miro. Adobe XD (which I never really got into that much, as I was a Sketch devotee) has been in maintenance mode since 2023. Avocode shut down. Abstract, which handled version control for design files, is gone. And this month, Motiff and Visily both announced they're winding down on October 31.

This is the nature of software products. It's how this industry works. But every time a tool dies, someone loses an afternoon working out what to move to. So when I built DesignEng Index, I gave it a graveyard: one page per dead or retired tool, with when it…

Meticulous founder John Athayde recently joined Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, and David Hill on the Remote Ruby podcast to recap Rails World 2026 and discuss the changing landscape of Ruby, Rails, and software development. The conversation covers new developments in the Rails ecosystem, including Spinel, Roundhouse, and improvements in performance, before turning to one of the conference's biggest themes: the impact of AI on the future of programming.

The discussion explores what happens to software craftsmanship when writing code is no longer the primary job of a developer. John and the hosts consider how AI is changing the relationship between design, development, and creativity, why testing and continuous integration are becoming increasingly important, and whether opinionated frameworks like Rails become even more valuable as AI-assisted development matures. They also reflect on the value of conferences and the importance of community in an industry undergoing rapid change.

I have a variety of customers who have their own Claude team account and don't want random things happening on other accounts. There are a lot of reasons for this, such as data sharing and ensuring they have oversight on what is happening on their overall account, especially related to spend for outcomes.

Fable helped me figure out a straightforward way to get this setup so I never am in the wrong account or have to log out and log in, and the trick is to set up custom .claude folders in your user root. This requires direnv that you can install via homebrew or some other package manager

# one time for each client account
mkdir ~/.claude-clientname

Where clientname is your client or a logical way to describe them, so you'll know what you're looking at later. Then you want to log in with that customer's credentials that they…

It's been a rough spring. We lost 45 pullets to raccoons over the past month and change. We were looking at a great egg-laying flock, and they are simply gone. 

After we had lost the first batch, I had set up a catch trap, but a raccoon literally broke the door (bent the sheet metal in half), busting out. I set up a blind and got a pot shot off at one, but they show up at dark, and I'm not equipped with FLIR or other technology for that work.

We called in our local trapper, Steve Colvin (of Colvin Animal Damage Control ), and set up traps and waited. We caught one and thought we might be through the worst of it, but they came back. So we kept running the traps. 

To date, we've caught five adult raccoons and two adult possums, all working the coop. 

I never…

I recently moved a Scouting WordPress site off of Flywheel and onto a Dokku box I run myself. The migration went fine. That is a different post. The migration left me with a problem Flywheel used to solve for free: when something breaks at 11pm, how do I find out before a member/volunteer does?

I've been using AppSignal for a very long time for all my Rails apps. They shipped a PHP integration recently, and it hit my "to do" list for the migration. The catch, which became the whole adventure: AppSignal for PHP supports Laravel and Symfony. WordPress appears nowhere in their documentation. WordPress appears nowhere in anyone's documentation. It is the eternal special case, a composer-less, framework-less island that also happens to run half the web.

This is the story of bolting the two together anyway. It works, and works well: real per-request traces with database query spans…

Back in April, John opened Blue Ridge Ruby 2026 with a talk that had very little to do with the things you usually see on a Ruby conference stage. No benchmarks, no framework upgrades, no live coding. Instead, photographs of trees. Forests. His own land. The talk, Learning from Permaculture: Sustainable Software Development, drew on twelve-plus years of farming with permaculture and twenty-plus years of designing and building software to ask a simple question: what does the garden know about building things that last?

The recording is now live on RubyEvents, and we wanted to mark the occasion, in part because of how the room received it and in part because of the company it kept.

Permaculture starts from a few principles that sound almost too simple to be useful: observe before you act, produce no waste, value the margins. Anyone who has inherited a large codebase knows the…