Valentino Stoll

I feel like, you know, like a lot of people don't like they like to draw parallels of like front end coding to back end coding. And like, you know, if somebody wants to switch to Rust, like, you know, that's a much steeper learning curve than just switching from jQuery to React or something like that.

So how do you assess switching to new technologies or adopting new things? What is your thought process on doing that?

I'm curious on your thoughts about this idea, because I have a total agreement, fewer dependencies the better, but at the same time, some dependencies are like, it's better to have a community building and identifying bugs and

resolving features like what are your thoughts on that like how do you gauge like whether or not like community support around a certain feature set or technology or gem is like worth it uh over building it yourself yeah i mean for a start i suppose you have to have to look at the activity on it don't you if it's an active gem then

At least you're not someone like ThoughtBot that has like all of their clients using their thing and that they now have abandoned and upgrade everybody and worry about that. But I'm curious, like, so let's take a look at the dependency, like, aspect of things. Like, do you ever look at Rails as, like, do I need Rails, like, kind of thing?

Because one thing I... I've been to a lot of, like, you know, non-US-based or European-based Ruby conferences. It's, like, very much, like, absent in those community Rails. It's, like, not kind of, like, the preferred choice.

Yeah, for like, you know, just Sinatra or like, you know, some other web framework or just like Ruby specific app. Like they're just running Ruby itself. Like, do you ever like think about whether or not like you need, you know, Rails for something new you're building? Like, can this work as a spreadsheet or like, is this better as a command line tool?

Like, do you ever look to other things or is it just like default at this point?

Yeah. Dave is action off too. That's pretty great.

Yeah.

Ali, I'm curious, like, you have a lot of experience in, like, product development and, like, the business-focused aspect of, like, building things, right? So I'm curious, like, what your thoughts are on, like, you know, where... the technology is most helpful in the process, in the business side or developing the product?

And why are you still sticking with Rails at this point with all of the other stuff that's available? Is it familiarity? Or where do you see the technology really aligning with that aspect?

Is there an example in Rails where you found that feature being there just saved you a ton of effort if you had gone with something else in the moment?

It's funny because we talk about your PDFs example as being a great use case for Rails. I feel like files in general, if you want to just get a file upload working, Rails is great for that. But, like, if you want to cache it the right way, it's very complicated. But I feel like that's also true of anything, right? Like, getting CloudFront hooked up to any app in any language is a complex process.

Yeah. And then how do you, like, you know, what is the famous saying? Cache and validation is, like, one of the hardest, you know, naming and cache and validation. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Is there even a way to simplify this? Like...

I've been working on this fun project called Podcast Buddy. He's actually listening right now. It's an AI companion that just lives in the terminal. And I can ask him questions right now, but I don't know what he'll respond with. So I'm gonna...

It's not polished, but at the end of the episode here, he'll create some show notes for us on what everybody's been talking about in a nice organized format with links. So it's really fun. I use it for meetings too. Another version of it, I have a meeting buddy. And it's just so much fun playing with Whisper and doing things locally with all these LLMs and audio. It's a lot of fun.

So check that out, Podcast Buddy. And then I've been... I found this... Somebody has this project called LeRobot where they're building a robot arm that... has like a trainable robot arm that comes with that you can build with it to train it to do different things. And so somebody created a tutorial on how to do it all. And so I printed, downloaded all the files and printed out all the parts.

And I'll be building that just for kind of for fun, train a robot arm to do different things in my office. So we'll see how it goes.

This looks incredible. Thank you.