Blog

Inspecting hover-driven interfaces in DevTools can sometimes be very tricky. Many sites use JavaScript to control hover states, which means the usual “Force state > :hover” option doesn’t always work. The moment you move your mouse away, the element disappears, making it difficult to examine its structure or styles. A simple workaround is to briefly...

Designing for global audiences means thinking beyond left-to-right (LTR) text. Many languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, use right-to-left (RTL) writing. Supporting RTL is crucial if you want your app or site to feel natural to those users. The CSS direction property controls the direction of text, table layout, and even grid columns. By default, MDN recommends...

Ruby On Rails developers often find themselves creating migrations with columns that need to be non-nullable, but the standard migration generator creates nullable columns by default. Instead of generating a migration and then manually editing the file to add null: false, you can specify this constraint right from the command line (thanks to this PR...

Today the team at Basecamp released Action Native Push. Action Native Push brings a much-needed boost to Hotwire Native developers by enabling seamless integration of push notifications directly from Rails. Previously, sending notifications involved complex infrastructure like Amazon SNS or Pinpoint, but this gem simplifies the process by connecting directly to Apple’s APNs and Google’s...

Recently, we ran into a usability issue in our app. When customers archived Widgets, the interface gave no indication that anything was happening until the process was fully complete. This caused confusion for our users, and in many cases they attempted to archive the same Widget more than once. Without any visual feedback...

Our friends over at thoughtbot have just released Top Secret. Top Secret is a Rubygem that redacts sensitive information from free text before that text gets sent off to an AI LLM for processing. For example: raw_text = "My SSN is 123-45-6789 and my name is Keyser Soze" filtered_text = TopSecret::Text.filter(raw_text) filtered_text.output # => "My...

If you are anything like me, you don't like screenshots cluttering your desktop. Unfortunately, the desktop is the default place to store screenshots in macOS, so this has to be changed. Our plan here is to create a screenshots folder on our Mac, then have macOS save screenshots there. Next up, we want to have...

Model Context Protocol servers represent a significant leap forward in AI tooling. Rather than operating in isolation, Claude Code can now access your filesystem, control web browsers, analyze websites, and perform complex data processing tasks. This integration creates a seamless workflow where your AI assistant becomes an active participant in your development process rather than...

I've been using Claude Code lately, and I found myself wanting a simple way to know when Claude finished a task. Instead of watching the terminal, I figured a quick notification sound would do the trick. Luckily, Claude supports hooks, which are customizable actions that run when certain events occur. By editing the settings.local.json file...

I have been unhappy with the UI of Apple's emoji selector on macOS for a long time, so in a moment of inspiration I built my own! Introducing QuackQuack!, the emoji selector that lives in your menubar! The concept is extremely simple: You click the duck in your menubar which exposes a small window with...