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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨

@jbranchaud.bsky.social

1.2K followers 360 following 1.4K posts

Free-Range Software Dev and Consultant ✨ PostgreSQL • Ruby on Rails • TypeScript • React ✨ 🏃🐈🍹🎱 (he/him) | Chicago | Work with me: visualmode.dev

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · Nov 15

The Ruby language and community have given me so much, so I thought I'd give a little something back as #RubyConf wraps.

Introducing Ruby Operator Lookup!

A one-stop directory for all the operators and symbols you'll see in Ruby programs. There are sooo many 😅

www.visualmode.dev/ruby-operators

Screenshot with a heading "Ruby Operator Lookup" and subheading "and lots of special character syntax as well". There is a search box for searching through the operators and then a couple dozen buttons each displaying different operators and special characters.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2h

My next October spooky read is Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing 🧟‍♀️

The cover of Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing which shows a couple stylized panels: one of a close up of a woman’s face covered by her hand in horror, colored green; another of an outlined hand with a wedding ring; and a third of a jello dish on a platter on a wooden table.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2h

30/
Fever House (2023)
Keith Rosson
bsky.app/profile/jbra...

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 16d

A spooky read for a spooky month — here goes Keith Rosson’s Fever House 🤘

A photo of Fever House by Keith Rosson which is red background with big, capital yellow letters spelling out the title vertically. There is a black and white hand doing the rock and roll gesture in a sketch style.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2h

Just finished this. What a ride! 🤟

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 11h

“All Systems Down”

It’s surreal going on a walk over the lunch break and seeing entire storefront businesses closed due to the AWS outage.

Handwritten paper sign on the door of a fast casual restaurant that reads, “Closed Due to Global AWS Outage. All Systems Down.”

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15h

It helps to say words like "idempotent", but even without that they usually write these scripts with all the bells and whistles.

- check for edge cases, fail early, and print useful warnings
- set up term colors for nice-looking output
- report progress
- format and print results at the end
- etc.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15h

One of the most satisfying uses of LLMs in my software development workflow continues to be asking them to write hyper-specific DX scripts, often for one-off tasks.

e.g. I'm iterating on a feature that requires manual testing, write me a "refresh" script that does X, Y, Z between runs.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15h

www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/

Keyboard Maestro 11.0.4: Work Faster with Macros for macOS

Keyboard Maestro is the leading software for macOS automation. It will increase business productivity by using macros (or short cuts) with simple keystrokes.

www.keyboardmaestro.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15h

If I wanted to set up some bespoke, narrow browser automations to help a support team with super tedious data entry work, is Keyboard Maestro the obvious choice?

I'm imaging an automation that can read line by line from a CSV, do series of clicks, paste one or two values, save, go back, repeat.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 1d

I really enjoyed reading through the migration methodology. A lot of great ideas in there. E.g. that rspec test that runs some shell commands in order to compare the HTML outputs.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 1d

What were you using before this migration to Jekyll? What motivated the migration back to Jekyll?

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2d

I was looking into downloading the Amphetamine app, which I've used for years, as a tool for keeping my machine awake during the workday.

But I'm seeing that the `caffeinate` command comes baked in to MacOS and I think I could script it to do the same thing.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 3d

“Skills are Markdown with a tiny bit of YAML metadata and some optional scripts in whatever you can make executable in the environment. They feel a lot closer to the spirit of LLMs—throw in some text and let the model figure it out.”

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 3d

Claude Skills seems more my speed than MCP

“The core simplicity of the skills design is why I’m so excited about it.” — @simonwillison.net

simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …

simonwillison.net

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 3d

I'm experimenting with the idea of having my `code/` directory where I clone repos be full of namespaced directories of the github username the repo lives under. And then `git clone` under the relevant username.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 3d

I'm setting up a new MBP and yet again regretting not setting up a persisted and exportable version of my dev env and dotfiles.

Strongly considering fully adopting Dorian's instead because 1) it would save me a ton of time and 2) he is meticulous.

github.com/dkarter/dotf...

GitHub - dkarter/dotfiles: ✨ My dev setup

✨ My dev setup. Contribute to dkarter/dotfiles development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

💯

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

To be fair to JB, this is equivalent to me coming home from Vegas with like $75 in winnings.

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 4d

JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, won $1.4 million playing blackjack in Las Vegas. He reported the winnings on his 2024 tax returns, which his campaign released this week. “I was incredibly lucky,” he said.

JB Pritzker Won $1.4 Million Playing Blackjack in Las Vegas

The Illinois governor reported the winnings on his 2024 tax returns, which his campaign released this week. “I was incredibly lucky,” he said.

nyti.ms

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

this one really popped off

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

Chuffed to be finally migrating to a machine with an Apple Silicon chip

Holding a new MBP in an Apple back up in front of an Apple Store.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

Nothing beats walking away from the computer for a couple hours and then coming back, stashing your changes, and absolutely clobbering the refactoring you were stuck on with a much better approach in a fraction of the time.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

Why do you like remapping j/k to gj and gk? I'm missing the intuition on that one.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 4d

that series was just recommended to me, so when I saw the first I grabbed it!

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 5d

I feel like as tooling has improved and expanded, the bar keeps getting higher and higher for a modern setup.

e.g. LSPs and formatters are amazing and I don't want to develop without them, but it makes my (neo)vim setup way more complicated than circa 2015.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 5d

I'm totally caught in this conundrum.

(Neo)vim is where I'm most productive. I don't want those productivity gains to get cancelled out by all the config tinkering.

I think part of the answer is probably to have individual-maintained and community-maintained setups and starter kits.

Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 5d

I’m not sure about the 1% thing. I’ve actually tried to switch away from vim to an IDE (atom, sublime, VS Code) many times, but it never stuck because I like how stable and fast vim is.

I do think that as I get older I have less and less patience for tinkering with configuration.

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🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨ @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 5d

so many (neo)vim goodies in this thread

Hilleloween @hillelwayne.com · 7d

For every cool (neo/)vim tip or script someone shares with me I will share one in return

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