#cli
The silent genius of the DNS protocol — the story of my life.
Hundreds of companies sell DNS, yet almost none can import another provider's export, even though the standard interchange format has existed since the eighties: the zone file. The 1.0 rewrite of my dnsmadeeasy Ruby gem finally embraces it, Terraform-style: export, edit, plan, apply. Includes a live demo on this blog's own domain, and the story of thirty years that led here.
Deterministic Meets Probabilistic: How I Solved Forms by Writing Four Ruby Gems and Made my Wife Happy
Famous last words: 'How hard can a small intake form be?' Several months and four interconnected open-source gems later, I have achieved peak engineering enlightenment. Here is how Inquirex turns messy free-text into deterministic, typed graph states.
How I Shipped a Swift CLI in an Hour, with Tests & CI. My First Ever Swift.
Mermaid exports SVGs that OmniGraffle imports as a diagram of empty boxes. In under an hour I diagnosed why (their SVGs are built for browsers, not native apps) and shipped svg2og — a working Swift CLI — despite never having written a line of Swift in my life. A short story about what the age of AI actually changes.
Sopsy: Secrets in Git, Sealed by the Secure Enclave
A small Rust CLI that lets your team commit encrypted secrets straight into git, with the private key locked inside your Mac's Secure Enclave and released only by your fingerprint. Here's what it does, the excellent little bugs I stepped on getting there, and why I think it is a genuinely nice way to run secrets on a team.
How to Write Awesome CLI tools in Ruby and test them with RSpec and Aruba
This post details how to use dry-cli gem to create multi-command and sub-command CLI tools, and how to test them using RSpec and Aruba.
Dead Simple Encryption with Sym
Most of us are familiar with the concept of application secrets, how important it is is not to commit those to your version control system, and how challenging it is to distribute development and production secrets across the dev team in a consistent and, most importantly, secure fashion. In this post we introduce a new Ruby Gem called 'Sym' for symmetric encryption.