RunDeck is an excellent tool from PagerDuty to automate certain tasks.

Suprisingly, resetting default admin user password in a docker container isn’t easy.

Default username is admin and the password is admin. Apparently, this is not the securest password, and needs to be changed.

To update it in the container, you have create a file

/home/rundeck/server/config/realm.properties with the contents

admin:YourNewPassword,user,admin

though, if you want to be more secure (I assume that you’d want).

You probably faced similar error.

Could not find compatible versions

Because every version of paranoia depends on activerecord >= 6, < 8.1
  and rails >= 8.1.0 depends on activerecord = 8.1.0,
  every version of paranoia is incompatible with rails >= 8.1.0.
So, because Gemfile depends on rails ~> 8.1
  and Gemfile depends on paranoia = 3.0.1,
  version solving has failed.

This means your gem paranoia wants activerecord with version less than 8.1, but you tested and know it should work.

While grokking through Rails source code, one pattern caught my eye, namely Suppressor.

Here is the full listing, and as you could spot, it’s quite concise.

But, I spent some time trying to figure out how it works in the context of ActiveRecord. How does it suppress callbacks and notifications?

Honestly, it took me a while to figure out. Give yourselve several minutes to read through the code. It’s really there!

I was today years old when I learned about Cmd + Shift + p command palette in Google Chrome.

Why you might need it?

To enable dark mode emulation!

Rails is a great framework, once you stop thinking in Java patterns and embraice DHH way of writing web apps.

Interestingly, Basecamp uses exactly the same ActiveStorage implementation, but shows full-size and download links alone with the PDF attachment. But if you only follow the guide, it’s hard to implement by your own without some gotchas.

These gotchas I want to capture here in this how-to article. It assumes reader followed official guide and stuck with PDF thumbnails preview implementation.

As many of us, I was writing data migrations as a part of database schema migrations.

Why that’s a bad practice, and what’s the better way to do this.

1. Your data migration typically comes along with changes to schema. Do you have the data migration together with schema migration?
2. If your data processing fails in the middle of migration, what’s the way to resume it?
3. Do you ever need it again? I.e. does it make sense to keep this migration in migrations history?

If you tick at least two checks, congrats, you don’t have to keep data migrations with schema migrations. Just write a script, execute it and throw away!

Argh, some things I should have learned earlier!

One of these is this brilliant blog post Vanilla Rails is plenty couldn’t have bigger influence on me. Believe me or not, I wrote Rails wrong since 2007 🤦‍♂️.

Here is the list of gems i’m ditching out of my Rails projects.

- knockout-rails
- paloma
- simple-form
- rails-timeago
- carrierwave
- resque
- resque-web
- resque-scheduler
-- we are here --
- devise
- haml
- factory-bot
- rspec
- bower-rails
- sprockets
- google-visualr
- recurring-select
- select2-rails
- pundit

adding a few

GitHub CLI is a nice way to query GitHub API locally

gh api orgs/<org>/teams | jq '.[] | {name,slug}'

If you use Claude Code (or any LLM coding agent), you’re burning tokens on noise. Every git status, every ls, every test run sends the full unfiltered output into your context window. Most of it is useless.

rtk (Rust Token Killer) is a CLI proxy that sits between your LLM agent and shell commands. It filters and compresses output before it hits the context. The result: 60-90% fewer tokens on common dev operations.

I work on multiple Jira tickets in parallel. Context switching used to mean stashing, branching, losing my train of thought. Two shell functions fixed that.

The idea

Git worktrees give you isolated working directories that share the same .git. Combine that with Jira API and Claude Code, and you get one-command parallel AI coding sessions.

Setup

First, store your Jira token in macOS Keychain:

security add-generic-password -a "[email protected]" -s "jira-api-token" -w "YOUR_TOKEN" -U

Then add these to your ~/.zshrc: