The Art && Science of Ruby
The Art && Science of Ruby
Baz (Rahoul Baruah)
I'm Baz (aka Rahoul Baruah) and I've been writing ruby code professionally since 2005, and I've been a freelancer, dedicated to building low-cost bespoke systems for tiny businesses (generally no more than ten employees) since 2007.
Latest Posts
This is Winston Fathead. He died yesterday. He arrived at our house in September 2014 - this is him, on the day of his arrival, sleeping on the chair that was reserved for our previous dog, Wookie. He was a rescue from the RSPCA (they...
When I was a kid I always wanted to be a creative type. I loved writing, I loved drawing, I loved music. I decided I was going to be a musician (and I was pretty good, a very long time ago). But if I was to have to get a "proper" job,...
This video shows my current process for enhancing an existing feature using Claude Code. The key things to note: I spend a fair amount of time on the original prompt (when Claude is in plan mode) - telling it which files I think will be...
Quoting Nilesh Jasani The speed of this pivot was breathtaking. The skeptics changed their arguments with the terrified fervor of late converts. They did not change their underlying conclusions. The conclusion always came first ... The...
I got my first "professional" software development job in 1998. I put professional in quotes because it was a bit of a mess - a tiny place with one guy who knew enough to knock a database together who hired me, not long out of...
Writing code with LLMs (February 2026 edition) At the start of the year, I said to Mahhek, a fellow developer "you need to learn how to use these coding agents - because what you and I do will not exist, as a job, by the end of the...
The other day, I asked Cher, my OpenClaw instance if it could read my email and notify me if something important came in. It said it would be easy; then I mentioned I used ProtonMail (which is end-to-end encrypted and, as a result, does...
The Jobs Crisis My job, as I have known it for the past twenty-five years, is no more. As someone who's only ever worked at small companies [1] or on my own, I probably had to do much more than software developers at large corporate...
Now, when it comes to technology, I'm actually pretty conservative. There have only really been two key moments where I've got excited about technology. Seeing a Mac for the first time Writing applications in Ruby on Rails All the rest...
More family stuff to deal with. And work has mainly been a mixture of frustration and LLMs. Sporadically For Site Manager I took great care setting up Capybara/Selenium tests. I put in a whole load of timing code and the tests ran...
(Published a few days after week two). I've been reading the Murderbot books and I've been pretty hooked. My wife started reading them, then the series came on Apple TV and I watched it - but I've turned to the books as they are...
Claude builds a UI I did a sketch on my iPad, showing a dashboard in both desktop and mobile layouts. I gave it to Claude, with a short description (for example "the hero section has a fixed height, so the news articles there have a...
I've never written an annual review before. Mainly because I have zero memory and everything passes by in a blur. But this year I'm going to give it a go. Mainly because I have zero memory and everything passes by in a blur. Let's start...
Recently I've returned to "outside in" style development. This used to be really popular ten to fifteen years ago, but kind of vanished. I suspect the reason for this is because it's a style of development that does not fit when your...
I recently gave a talk at the North West Ruby User Group about how I use LLMs for software development. This was an update on a previous demo I had given on Claude Code. We didn't record the talk, but here are my (adapted) notes. LLMs...