Howdy, and happy Wednesday.

A very nice and concise summary of all the lesser-known and under-appreciated benefits of using partials in Rails. There are a lot of alternatives to partials these days, but they’re so nicely integrated with models, views, and layouts, I still lean heavily towards using partials and leveraging caching to reduce performance impacts.   The only thing I’d add is that any class can work seamlessly with partials as long as it has defined a to_partial_path method. With that, we’re not limited to rendering only ActiveRecord models with an implicitly associated partial.

As someone who has spent far too much time thinking about managing configuration and secrets in Rails applications, this post from Joy of Rails is solid. 

Learn how to use “Rails config x” and add your own configuration options to your Rails app with built-in methods, ActiveSupport::OrderedOptions, and practical use cases.

Rails provides a plethora of great tools for managing configurable values, environment variables, credentials/secrets, and even per-environment variations. Like generators, while Rails uses them plenty internally, all of these tools are equally available and accessible for our own custom configuration bits.

Companies love to plaster their logos everywhere. In many ways, the degree to which companies prioritize their logo visibility on products speaks volumes about the company’s priorities.   As an amputee, I like it even less when companies slap obtrusive logos on my feet or legs. In most cases, there’s very little we can do, so most of us just accept it.

Like many other amputees, after seeing a cosmetic prosthesis that reminded me most of a severed hand, I opted for a more mechanical mien. But plastered across the top of the bionic hand I wanted, in traffic-cone orange and black, was the device’s name, bebionic.

It’s often not worth railing against the corporate narcissism, but it’s one thing to add obtrusive logos to products can people can choose not to use. Putting a logo on a body part someone has to wear every day? That’s rather shameless in my book.

We’re close to rolling out updated pricing for Flipper Cloud, and it goes against most of the advice we heard from other SaaS teams. We’re moving forward anyways because it feels like the right thing to do for our context.  

When we started billing for Flipper Cloud, we did what everyone else in the space was doing – per seat pricing. $20 per seat each month felt like plenty. As time has passed this choice has increasingly bothered me. The past few months I’ve been thinking about what type of billing I like.

Instead of strategizing about maximizing revenue, we focused on finding an approach that would maximize customer satisfaction while leaving room for reasonable profit. We could be entirely wrong, but there’s really only one way to find out.

I haven’t yet tried this tactic, but I really like the idea. Instead of requesting answers, we request a sort of virtual debate to help us strengthen our own thinking as we try to write it down.  

Let’s turn the tables and have ChatGPT prompt us. Tell AI to ask you questions about what you’re writing. Push yourself to express in clear terms what you really want to say.

Of course, there’s still the fact that AI uses an inordinate amount of power, but this is one of those applications that feels like it has real potential if the power usage can ever get under control. It’s like a rubber duck for your thoughts.