Many voices. One Flagrant.
I just participated in PiCoSteveMo. What’s that? It’s a month-long game jam for making a PICO-8 game inspired by a Stephen King work. Oh, did that just raise further questions? Hold on. “What’s a game jam?” It’s an event where you try to create a video game from scratch. “What’s...
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September 12, 2025
Recently I did something I haven’t done for a long, long, long time — start up a Rails project from scratch. Well, I didn’t even really go “from scratch”, but from a jumping-off point, using Jumpstart. But let’s say that’s close enough to scratch. Since I’ve spent so much of my career
June 5, 2025
Every now and then I wonder if (or how much) I really like programming, or if it’s just something I do as a job or because I’ve done it for so long. Then I remember that in my free time I will play programming games. Programming games? Games about programming. Games where you program. Some of
July 25, 2024
Hey there. Yossef here, and I have a story about pagination for you. We all know about pagination, right? Instead of showing a huge list of all 30,293 results at once, you get just a slice of 20 of those results (or 50, or 100, or whatever), and you can move through these slices, “page” by
July 18, 2024
In the world of software solutions, businesses often face a critical decision: should they build custom software, rent licensed software, or buy off-the-shelf solutions? Each option has its own pros and cons, but building custom software can be one of the better choices for businesses
June 11, 2024
Last time I talked about soft deletion, I laid out a sticky situation I got myself into. That was mostly background and context to get to this point, where I can share a solution. Away we go! All these problems got me entirely fed up with this database-view way of handling soft deletion, and I
March 19, 2024
I was working on an import process, basically slurping in a bunch of data and shoving it into a database. Well, a little more nicely than just “shoving”. There’s massaging the data a bit from the input format, validating it, and then going through the normal creation flow (at least the
February 6, 2024
To start, what is soft deletion? It’s just adding some data to a database record (like a flag or a timestamp) to mark something as “deleted”, so it remains in the database but is no longer shown. There are a few reasons to do this, but the big one is making the record easy to restore (just remove
March 22, 2023
Sometimes when you’re working on a system, you find something standing in the way of progress that is so baked-in, so foundational, so fundamental that it’s hard to do anything about it. Or it’s even hard to even see at first. I like to call things like these the “original sins” of a system.
March 10, 2023
In “Understanding Comics”, Scott McCloud talks about a six-step path that the creation of art goes through. (Just to side-step any philosophical debate on “what is art?”, he himself says “the creation of any work in any medium”, and I’ll rephrase that as “any creative endeavor”. As in any time
February 22, 2023
Have you ever seen one of those push-button marionette toys? They’re basically a bunch of beads with a string running through them. When the string is tight, it holds all the beads together in shape, and you can see it as a dog, or person, or whatever. But push the button and loosen the string,
January 6, 2023
We remember the era of “move fast and break things”, right? It felt edgy and cool, but I’ve never been cool and it didn’t feel right to me. I like to focus instead on “keeping things moving” and “keeping things working”. The “move fast and break things” saying makes it sound a bit like moving
August 30, 2022
Imagine you’re digging through some part of a system, and you come across something that looks confusing. You’re trying to figure out why something is done, or why it’s done the way it is. You have so many questions running through your head: Was this a conscious decision? Did it just happen?
January 27, 2022
Have you heard of a “design pattern”? If you have, and if you know the history, and if you don’t feel like double- or triple-checking how well I’m going to explain this, you can skip this entire post. Otherwise, buckle up! Simply put, a “design pattern” is a general, reusable solution to a
