Forem: Josua Schmid

Laggy Logitec and M1

Josua Schmid — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:50:14 +0000

I had a stuttering laggy bluetooth mouse (Logitec) on my M1 Macbook (macOS Sequoia). The solution was to disable handoff. Now it moves smooth.

Autostart OpenRecall

Josua Schmid — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:55:43 +0000

I'm running OpenRecall to record my screen and index the screenshots. To start it automatically on login on my Macbook, I installed an AppleScript automation:

on run {input, parameters}

    tell application "iTerm"
        activate
        create window with default profile
        tell current session of current window
            write text "cd /Users/josua/p/openrecall/ && python3 -m openrecall.app"
        end tell
    end tell

    return input
end run

On save (CMD+S) this will create an app under services which you can then install as login item.

Shopify's 2000

Josua Schmid — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 22:05:55 +0000

Since Renuo is a member of the Rails Foundation, @coorasse and me were invited to the speakers dinner at Rails World 2025.

We met people from Shopify and we started discussing. What do they even know about the one-man-agency-Rails we're using in our agency? They have their huge Rails 0.5 originated monolith and are proud of it. Don't they over-optimize for the monolith case? Far-from-agency-reality use cases, right?

What I did not know until that point was that Shopify has 2000 further Rails applications running. They know our agency problems better than you might think.

Small Dev Fascination

Josua Schmid — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:12:21 +0000

I host a meetup called Railshöck in Zürich. From time to time someone shows up and holds a presentation from another world. They have small companies with one or two employees and they custom-tailor their Rails workflow to an extent which fascinates me. They own their development stack so completely that it's difficult to understand what they do at all. But it works for them in their own bubble. Without the need to share conventions over a large company.

The latest two examples I want to mention are Christian Seldmair with Svelte on Rails and Sandro Kalbermatter with compony.

Svelte on Rails is the realisation of the fact that you may want to sprinkle some reactiveness into your frontend without having the flicker effect like with Stimulus connects (worked around with the morph-dom and turbo). It's quite an elegant niche solution for a very interesting Rails problem using vite and server side rendering.

And compony is sheer DSL madness made exactly for the brain of Sandro. But because it's so productive for him, he discovered a new software design pattern. It's called the Anchor Model. It solves the problem of singleton database entities (think enum).

Customize the Rails Console

Josua Schmid — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:25:13 +0000

You can configure what happens when running rails console with the console block in application.rb. Here I register a custom descendant of the Rails IRB console to change coloring:

console do
  require "rails/commands/console/irb_console.rb"

  class CloudyConsole < Rails::Console::IRBConsole
    def colorized_env
      if Rails.env.production?
        if ENV.fetch("HEROKU_APP_NAME", "")[/-develop|-staging/]
          return IRB::Color.colorize("prod", [:YELLOW])
        end

        if `hostname`[/develop-/]
          return IRB::Color.colorize("prod", [:YELLOW])
        end
      end

      super
    end
  end

  config.console = CloudyConsole.new(Rails.application)
end

The Testing Psyche

Josua Schmid — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:15:39 +0000

I'm only seeing dots when my Ruby RSpec test suite is running. But a lot is going on in my brain.

Are the failing tests related in an easy-to-fix way or not?

These are either very easy to fix, because they are close together. It's probably about one conceptual fix. Or the test file can be deleted because the implementation vanished.
I hope, this is related in a predictable way, like that I'm calling the service which is broken or vanished.
Oh-oh is there a case-distinction? I hope the FF correspond to the FF in 1.

Resolution

Factory not registered: "user". Good for me. I know that I deleted it.
Missing partial shared/emails/loyalty/_email_salutation. What now? This seems weirdly unrelated. No idea why this happens.
undefined local variable or method 'user'. Good for me. This is in fact related to 1.

web-console and processes

Josua Schmid — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:17:50 +0000

Sometimes I see No exception information available in web-console.

Digging in the web-console source finds me this:

If you happen to run on a multi-process server (like Unicorn or Puma) the process this request hit doesn't store %{id} in memory. Consider turning the number of processes/workers to one (1) or using a different server in development.

So I look at my config/puma.rb, change it and never see this error message again.

Catch JS Errors with Playwright

Josua Schmid — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:18:25 +0000

Selenium has issues. I'm using it with Capybara and the latest encounter was a Net::ReadTimeout. I switched to Playwright following Justin Searls guide.

One issue I encountered after the migration was that browser console logs were not accessible anymore with page.driver.browser.logs.get(:browser). We use them to fail tests on JavaScript errors.

One solution is to record them from the Playwright page with an event handler.

config.before(:each, type: :system, js: true) do |example|
  example.metadata[:js_console_messages] ||= []
  Capybara.current_session.driver.with_playwright_page do |page|
    page.on('console', lambda { |msg|
      example.metadata[:js_console_messages] << {
        type: msg.type,
        text: msg.text,
        location: msg.location
      }
    })
  end
end

config.after(:each, type: :system, js: true) do |example|
  if example.metadata[:js_console_messages].present?
    aggregate_failures 'javascript console messages' do
      example.metadata[:js_console_messages].each do |msg|
        if msg[:type] == 'error'
          expect(msg[:text]).to be_nil, "JS Error: #{msg[:text]}"
        elsif msg[:type] == 'warning'
          warn "WARN: JS warning at #{msg[:location]}:\n#{msg[:text]}"
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

The output of a failed test will look like this:

The previous solution to simply look at page.driver.browser.logs.get(:browser) felt more natural to me. I'd be happy to receive a hint on how to catch JS errors in Ruby more nicely.

Much Compliance and Config

Josua Schmid — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:05:54 +0000

Dear developers

Please refrain from creating GitHub repositories like this one:

The main thing you want to show me is your code. What you need is the following:

README.md
LICENSE.md (maybe, mention it in README.md)
main.js
package.json, package-lock.json
.env.sample (maybe)

These are 6 files. I don't want to juggle 16 files in my brain to find what I'm looking for in the repo root directory. Please use folders to hide what one doesn't need to see at a first glance.

If you want another example of how all this configuration madness spoils my greppability of code bases, have a look at what JavaScript did to Rails in my May of WTF post.

standardrb, but more

Josua Schmid — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 18:46:49 +0000

Often project teams suffer from either too many or too strict Rubocop rules (NewCops) or from outdated ones because they locked the rules or Rubocop versions. standardrb provides a good middle ground for people who care but also don't care fanatically. Its default settings are optimized for long-term maintainability and no-bikeshed. But we at Renuo are still missing a lot of rules, especially from Rubocop plugins like RSpec or performance cops. Since standardrb relies on Rubocop under the hood, there's an easy way for you to use a default but extended configuration. Simply opt-in to the rules you want while relying on standardrb for the rest. This inverts the team discussion time needed for your style guide from discussing every rule to discussing opt-in-exceptions.

If you want to have a look at our approach: we created a gem called renuocop. Our config file documents what we think is not strict enough in standardrb.

8KB limit of Postgres NOTIFY

Josua Schmid — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:20:32 +0000

You can setup Rails ActionCable to use Postgres instead of Redis by adjusting the adapter configuration:

# config/cable.yml

production:
  adapter: postgresql
  url: <%= ENV["DATABASE_URL"] %>
  channel_prefix: myapp_production

This uses the Postgres LISTEN and NOTIFY commands.

As of writing, the NOTIFY payload is limited to 8000 bytes per default. If you're using Hotwire this may not always be enough and you will see error messages like this

PG::InvalidParameterValue (ERROR:  payload string too long)

The solutions available to you are the following:

Configure Postgres for larger payloads (not possible on Heroku)
Use a fallback strategy for larger payloads as implemented in the actioncable-enhanced-postgresql-adapter gem.
Use Redis instead (with its own limits)

0.x Major Releases

Josua Schmid — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:20:37 +0000

Dear Ruby gem maintainers

Are you aware that 0.x releases of your libraries have to be treated as major releases by me? – Even and especially if you're following semantic versioning (see https://semver.org/#spec-item-4).

In the list of my Depfu updates I more and more often receive lists like this.

I feel that you're bailing out of your responsibility for compatibility that we all owe to Matz. You should have every right to change everything you want in your code, but why not simply bump the correct version number part when you do that? Are you afraid of real first digit major versions?