I started this blog in 2005, back when Ruby on Rails felt like a secret handshake. Dig around in the archives and you’ll find advice from another era. Some of it still works... some of it probably belongs in a museum. That’s software for you.

Somehow, I became the guy who spends a lot of time talking about what happens after the shiny new framework smell wears off. These days I run Planet Argon, where we help organizations modernize and sustain their Rails apps. I accidentally launched Oh My Zsh, which millions of developers now use daily (still blows my mind). And I host two podcasts: Maintainable, where I dig into the art (and chaos) of long-lived software, and On Rails, where I chat with other developers about the architectural tradeoffs that shape our apps.

This blog is where I tinker in public. Tutorials, stories, half-formed ideas... it’s part documentation, part therapy. If anything here helps you avoid a painful rewrite or just makes you feel less alone in the trenches, then I’m glad you stopped by.

Thanks for caring about the unglamorous, essential work of keeping software alive. Someone’s got to...