• Why Use Postgres - A classic post updated with stuff from the past five years of development.
• Obnoxious.css - "Animations for the strong of heart, and weak of mind."
• Introducing Mavo: Create Web Apps Entirely By Writing HTML! - Looks interesting, and I've got a new Girl Scout site to spin up soonish...
• hub - Command-line wrapper for git that integrates it more closely with GitHub features.

• dry-view 0.3.0: another step towards solving the view layer mess - While I respect people who are hunting for a better Rails architecture, I've seen more projects ruined by excess architecture than the usual mess. Still interesting ideas.
• Great programming talks to watch on your lunch break - Yep, there are some great talks here. But for the love of Roscoe, eat lunch on your lunch break and learn things on company time!
• Front-end Style Guides - Not a guide itself, but an ebook on building a guide for your own company.$8 ebook.
• TLDR Stock Options - Quick (and probably wrong) estimate of whether your startup stock options are worth anything. For an even quicker estimate: assume $0 and you'll hit the median just fine.

• REST Anti-Patterns - Arguments about what is and is not REST are right up there with arguing about "best" editors. Still, there are some things that make it harder to interoperate, and this article runs through a pile of them.
• Hatch - $15/month gets you a tool that sets up Ruby, Nginx, passenger, PostgreSQL, Redis, ActionCable, and more on Digital Ocean servers.
• Gigalixir - Platform-as-a-Service for Elixir and Phoenix applications, including clustering, hot upgrades, and other goodies.
• CircleCI integration for Elixir/Phoenix project - A quick example of the new flexibility in the CircleCI 2.0 beta.
• Remote Non-Senior Developers, Part 1: What Your Company Should Look For - I'm happy to see more explicit thought about remote-first work these days. It's been a challenging few decades on that front.
• An API for Everything - Yes, there is one. Some of them might even be useful.
• bundleup - Color-coded report of the changes that bundler would make if you let it update. This one is going in my toolbox alongside bundler-audit.
• Standing Up to a Dangerous New Breed of Patent Troll - Cloudflare is fighting back against the trolls, including offering bounties to put them out of business. And in other stupid patent news, Moom removed from sale.
• The OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer (OSDS) - Addon to extract web page metadata in Chrome, Firefox, or Edge.
• I Don't Believe in Blockchain - Time Bray tosses some well-deserved skepticism at one of the current VC darlings.

• Git 2.13 has been released - Probably worth upgrading if only to get the SHA-1 collision detection built-in.
• CockroachDB 1.0 is Production-Ready - A milestone release for this "cloud-native SQL database."
• Infographic: The 2017 'Martech 5000' Marketing Technology landscape - That's basically 5000 companies devoted to collecting data on your and shoving online ads into your browser. Depressing.
• Visual Studio for Mac - My past has caught up with me.
• Kolide - "Treat your infrastructure like a queryable database". If you're running hundreds of thousands of servers, this looks like a very useful tool.
• PG MatViews for better performance in Rails - Using PostgreSQL materialized views to boost performance (at the cost of some other tradeoffs, like needing to refresh the views and not having absolutely-current data).
• Rails 5.0.3 and 5.1.1 have been released! - Another round of bugfixes, nothing security-critical.
• 2017-05-11 Security Update Release - For PostgreSQL, including a bunch of other bug fixes. One of the vulnerabilities is a password disclosure, so pay attention if you use foreign servers.
• Patching is Hard - Another installment in "This is why we can't have nice things."
• The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat - Best bit of advice for small teams: "In general, we try to use as few tools and services as possible."
• IoT Hall-of-Shame - Archive of known busted things on the Internet of Things. This is not going to end well.

• Introducing Stack Overflow Trends - A new way to play the "my programming language is better than yours" game. (Ruby is still comfortably ahead of Elixir by the way).
• Das Keyboard 5Q - Mechanical switches and colored LED keytops that can be controlled over the internet. So kind of a 50-pixel output device.
• Prepack - "A tool for making JavaScript code run faster" by optimizing away as many object allocations and intermediate computations as possible. Not for production use but probably worth keeping an eye on.
• CPU Utilization is Wrong - top(1) is not telling you what you think it is telling you.
• Gixy - Static configuration analyzer for nginx, focused mainly on security issues.

• Announcing SyntaxNet: The World's Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source - Usually things like NLU are off my radar, but how can you ignore "Parsey McParseface"?
• Security Advisory: Secured Environment Variables - If you use the open-source version of Travis CI, then OAuth tokens were potentially exposed to world + dog. You need to read this & cycle the tokens.
• Thunderbird's Future Home - Still under the Mozilla Foundation, but spinning out its own infrastructure (and paying for it via donations). I still think Thunderbird is way better than built-in MacOS mail, so I'll happily support this.
• How to Perform Security Audits With Lynis on Ubuntu 16.04 - If you're doing your own sysadmin, this is useful info. I prefer paying someone else who actually knows what they're doing when I can get away with it.

• Learn Node - Training to build apps with Node.js, Express, MongoDB and other modern tools. A new video course from Wes Bos at an introductory $72 price.
• Griddy - Interactive tool that lets you explore how CSS grids work.
• URI Valet - Quick dump of all sorts of diagnostic information about web sites and servers.
• How to Add Vue to a Rails 5.1 App - A quick run through some of this newfangled webpack stuff.

• Things to Use Instead of JWT - Based on some recent experience I've had, I'd put "pointy sticks and clay tablets" in that category. Horrid specification.
• Sinatra 2.0.0 - I haven't seen a release announcement, but this version is tagged in the source tree.
• The vision behind Rails, DDD and the RailsEventStore ecosystem - Plenty of stuff to dig into if you'd like some alternative architectures for large Rails applications.
• Kubernetes clusters for the hobbyist - Because why not have ALL THE SHINY for your next toy web site? Lots of good step-by-step info here.

I was right, I'm back on the job market. Would love to go back to just writing code in a no-BS environment. MikeG1 [at] larkfarm.com.

• UglifyJS 3 - New release of this JavaScript parter/minifier/compressor/beautifier. Not backwards compataible and only supporting ES5.
• Active Admin 1.0.0 - Now with Rails 5.1 support and a shiny new version number. This framework for creating admin UI for Rails applications has survived a lot of changes along the way.
• Segment Open Fellowship 2017 - They're planning to support 3-5 open source projects with $8000 per month for 3 months. Application deadline is May 8, so hurry if you're interested.

• Introducing SSL for SaaS - Cloudflare is trying to make custom domains plus SSL easier to set up for multi-tenant SaaS applications. If you don't know what that means, you don't need to pay for it.
• Crafting Better Code Reviews - Hopefully your team is doing code reviews. Have you thought about how to improve them?
• The Lesser-known Features in Rails 5.1 - There are some good ones in there. But alas, I'll miss the late unlamented alias_method_chain.

Looks like I may be back on the job market again soon.

• CVE-2016-4442 - Security bug in rack-mini-profiler. Hopefully you're not shipping that in production anyhow.
• Ruby on Rails: the Bad and Good parts - Like any other article on this topic, this one is pretty opinionated. It will give you a few things to ponder though.
• Black Screen - Terminal emulator/shell built in Electron. I'm skeptical that it will be performant but it's pretty and has some interesting features.

• Rails Composer for Rails 5.1 - A chunk of the Rails ecosystem looking to raise some money via KickStarter.
• Kryptonite - "A new home for your SSH private key" that assumes you trust your phone more than your computer. I'm skeptical.
• Homebrew 1.2.0 - A new release that does a lot of work to clean up package repositories and versioning.

• Rails 5.1: Loving JavaScript, System Tests, Encrypted Secrets, and more - Released at RailsConf, as expected. Note that this makes everything below 4.2 unsupported and a potential security risk at any moment.
• Bundler's new update options - There are some more conservative approaches to dependency management here now. Personally I've liked being very explicit, staying close to head and updating one gem at a time. But that's a lot of work.
• Postgres tips for Rails developers - A few odds and ends that it's worth knowing about.

• Upgrade your SSH keys! - How to audit the strength of your existing keys and updte to ed25519 keys.
rake-helpers - Tasks for handling secrets via keybase or GPG.
• Hello Sidekiq 5.0 - A new version with a redesign to meld with some new architecture inside of Rails 5.

• Keep your Rails logs free of unwanted noise - Cut down on 404s from script kiddies with the use of rack-attack.
• Zen Rails Security Checklist - There really is no end to the number of security things you can be worried about.
• HTTP/2 is not Future. It's Present - So are you using it?

• Better Git Configuration - There's a lot you can do besides just set your name and email.
• The Enterprise Ready SaaS Feature Guides - You too can be enterprisey!
• Dockrails - Wrap up Docker, Docker-Compose, and Docker-Sync with various other bits to automagically generate a synchronized Docker environment for your Mac development box.

• Ruby Hail - Rack-based "nano framework" designed for microservices and single-page applications.
• Zeronet - "Open, free and uncensorable websites, using Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent network."
• DevelMail - Currently-free online SMTP server that doesn't actually send mail, for your testing needs.

• Replicated - Delivery system that "wraps your containerized cloud application with Enterprise-grade features and deploys it behind your customer's firewall, into a corporate data center or into the private cloud."
• ActionCable: The Missing Guide - An overview & survey of this new Rails 5 feature.
• Open Source License Business Perception Report - A lawyer evaluates common OSS licenses on the pain & confusion scale.

We're about to be looking for a Program Manager/Release Manager within driving distance of Evansville, Indiana. If that's you, drop me a line.

• PostgREST - Easy REST API from any PostgreSQL database.
• Penna - A retro wireless keyboard that will appeal to those of us who remember using manual typewriters.
• Announcing Hanami v1.0.0.rc1 - This simple web framework is just about ready to launch into the world.

• Tell Me When It Closes - New GitHub monitoring service from Thoughtbot, designed to minimize your email when you only care about an issue's resolution.
• Amazon Connect - Even if you don't need a "simple to use, cloud-based contact center", it's interesting to note them moving up the value chain into turnkey business flows.
• LocalStack - "A fully functional local AWS cloud stack." MOCK ALL THE THINGS!