Articles on @zhisme :: signal over noise

Not Best Time For An Open Source Contributions

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If intro sounds like an existential crisis to you, then yes – it should!

In the times before AI, there was a reason. You could add this to your CV and it would be valuable, someone could admire your work, find your PR, and even debate the decisions you made during an interview.
Some other resources, like the old Stack Overflow Jobs, allowed you to add your open-source contributions as widgets visible to anyone, and they had a very prominent place on that HTML page.

The Constant Frozen at Boot Bug: A Ruby Exercise For An Interview

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I like interview questions that come from real incidents instead of a puzzle book. You can’t google your way out of them, and the candidate’s reasoning maps directly onto the job. This one came from a payment service. It looks trivial. It is not.

I’ve stripped the production code and rebuilt the same shape around a fake payment router. The bug is identical; the names are not.

The Question

Here is a class that routes payments to a gateway. Occasionally a charge is
written to the database with method_id = NULL, even though the payment method
clearly exists in the payment_methods table. No exception is raised. The only
thing that reliably fixes it is restarting the process. Find the bug.

LLM Strikes Back But Not The Way We Wanted

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI strikes back, but not the way we wanted.

Recently I had an interview with a recruiter — a very interesting and unexpected interview for me. It’s a funny story that can teach you something and make you vigilant.
The interview started in a very cliché way: asking me about my experience, why I left my previous company, what I’m looking for, and what my goals are for a new workplace.

Give Your LLM Brevity

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Brevity is the Sister of Talent

A.P. Chekhov

Why?!

I don’t want to read invented machinery poems from an LLM about why it chose BigDecimal(0.5) instead of a literal 0.5 and writes 3 paragraphs defending a choice I didn’t ask about.
I don’t want to read invented nonsense that I have no time for.
If I don’t like something, I’ll ask to reimplement/refactor, or in rare cases request elaboration.
Then I will cover it with the needed tests until it satisfies me.
If you’re like me, you don’t want to spend time on that.

Multiple Git Configs Per Directory

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem

You have a personal GitHub and a work GitLab (or multiple work accounts). Your global ~/.gitconfig has your personal email. You clone a work repo, make a commit, push — and now your personal email is in the company git history. haha-haha classic..

You could run git config user.email in every new repo you clone. But you’ll forget. You always forget. But this is a boring routine, why do this?

Practical Useful Commands for Claude

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

These are commands I use often and see a lot of value from. I advise you at least to consider using them in case you haven’t tried them yet.

Commands

claude --worktree or claude -w

In case you want multiple agents to run simultaneously, this option was designed for it. Each Claude agent gets its own version of the repo so they won’t interfere with each other. Where can you use it? Let’s say you’re migrating something to a new architecture and there are multiple services that need changes, but they’re located in a monorepo. With this option, each agent will be moving its own service or “folder” if you want, without getting conflicts with others.

Disable Co-Authored-By Claude in Git Commits

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Solution

Open ~/.claude/settings.json with your favorite editor and add this to your json config. This is taken from Claude docs¹

{
 // ...
 "attribution": {
 "commit": "",
 "pr": ""
 }
}

Why

This actually makes no sense and I agree with Rob Pike’s take on that². It just adds non-readable boilerplate that does not add any value to the git commit. If it was committed by some guy I expect him to take responsibility of that commit, not some excuse like “that was written by Claude, sorry I didn’t check”. So it makes no sense at all, we are blind to that string anyway. Git commits should be atomic, simple and readable, not overwhelmed by nonsense. The trick above will help you with that.

OpenClaw Chameleon Hype

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Chameleon With Claws

clawdbot/moltbot/OpenClaw — this chameleon flew through our tight-knit tech world and generated a spectacular amount of hype. 184k GitHub stars in the last month alone. For context, Rails has 56k stars after nearly 20 years.

So what awaits this clawed chameleon — a rapid rise followed by an equally rapid fall?

What It Actually Is

If you boil down what this tool does: it’s a daemon running on your machine that has access to everything on your computer, configured through plain text .md files for whatever tasks you need.

How to Set Up Browser MCP in Claude Code

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How to set up MCP for browser

Create .mcp.json in your project directory with the following content:

{
 "mcpServers": {
 "chrome-devtools": {
 "command": "npx",
 "args": ["-y", "chrome-devtools-mcp@latest"]
 }
 }
}

Then run the following command in your terminal:

claude mcp add chrome-devtools --scope user npx chrome-devtools-mcp@latest

Then in Claude Code, run /mcp to verify the connection:

# start claude code cli
claude
# run /mcp inside cli
/mcp
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Manage MCP servers
 2 servers

 Project MCPs (/Users/zhisme/projects/my-project/.mcp.json)
 ❯ chrome-devtools · ✔ connected

Afterwards, run a sample command to verify that the browser MCP can start:

 ▐▛███▜▌ Claude Code v2.1.17
▝▜█████▛▘ Opus 4.5 · Claude Max
 ▘▘ ▝▝ ~/dev/projects/new-magtuner/mt-editor

❯ open with browser mcp url google.com

⏺ chrome-devtools - navigate_page (MCP)(type: "url", url:
 "https://www.google.com")
 ⎿  # navigate_page response
 Successfully navigated to https://www.google.com.
 ## Pages
 1: https://www.google.com/ [selected]

⏺ Opened google.com in the browser. The page is loaded and selected.

If you see a Google Chrome for Testing window like in the screenshot below, then everything is set up correctly. You can now tell Claude to visually verify your rendered pages.

Google chrome via browser mcp

Ruby IO buffering

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your Kibana/Cloudwatch/Grafana have different timestamps, you don’t see recent logs from your application. Why is that? You may ask. Some QA reports that your application is not working/was not deployed, asking you to review the deploy process. Or even worse: asking your devops colleagues to “something went wrong” with last deployment could you check?

You login into your shell running kubectl get pods to verify timestamps update or checking Helm releases helm ls. But everything seems fine, everything deployed. CI/CD is green, all timestamps updated. But yet. QA does not see the logs. Where have they gone?

Theory vs Practice: Why Technical Interviews Go Wrong

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Match interview complexity to job complexity.

Interview for what the job actually requires
System design interviews test interview prep, not engineering ability
Copying FAANG processes for non-FAANG problems is cargo cult
Knowledge you don’t use, you lose

An Exaggerated Hiring Story

HR contacts an engineer and asks them:

Hi, %username%
We are fast-growing, extra efficient, super sufficient
LIST of Fortune 500 FORBES %company_name%

Want to enlarge our staff and hire one another scintillating developer (YOU) to join our super friendly team
Let’s schedule a call to share the details and proceed with next steps

A word on internet privacy

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Sweetest Cookies

I recently found that people fall into the illusion that all these dancing popups that block your sight from reading articles, news, and other sites, with some bullshit title stating “We value your privacy, please set your choice,” and that pressing reject will stop them from tracking you. But there’s always a tiny asterisk saying (we will store only necessary anonymous data to keep our product improving). But the thing is, your cookies persist between site visits, and Google and other companies already put some data that can help identify you (but yes, it’s so-called “anonymous” data – nowhere does it state that you are, for example, Evgeny Zhdanov and you’re interested in programming and drinking beer).

copy_with_context.nvim v3 Released

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Previous post on original release is available at copy_with_context.nvim plugin released.

What’s New in v3

Automatic Repository URL Generation

The headline feature: when you copy code, the plugin now automatically includes a direct permalink to the code in your repository. No manual URL construction, no hunting for the right commit SHA—it just works.

-- When you copy this code, you get:
function authenticate(user)
 validate_credentials(user)
end

-- Output automatically includes:
-- app/controllers/auth_controller.rb:45-47
-- https://github.com/username/repo/blob/abc1234/app/controllers/auth_controller.rb#L45-L47

What it does:

You Don’t Need Types in Ruby

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There was a lively discussion on Hacker News here about Sorbet and static typing in Ruby that inspired this post.

It’s fascinating how people try to make Ruby look like a statically typed language. But this isn’t the first attempt — and every time, it ends up fighting against what Ruby fundamentally is.

Turning Ruby into Java isn’t progress. It’s a step backward.
Let me explain why.

How Ruby Deals with Types

Ruby is a dynamically typed, object-oriented language designed around message passing — an idea borrowed from Smalltalk.

Reviewing "Angry Tests"

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As software engineers, we’re used to writing tests — but we don’t always know how to write them well. We aim to cover the most significant lines of code, often guided by intuition. This book is a practical guide to writing better tests, and I found it to be a valuable resource for anyone involved in software testing — whether you’re a developer or a tester.

You can find the book, purchase options, and more details here:

Yegor’s site.

This book focuses on automated software testing — what to test, and how. It walks you through best practices and explains why solid testing is essential for long-term maintainability and support.

copy_with_context.nvim plugin released

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to announce the release of my new Neovim plugin, copy_with_context.nvim

When sharing code snippets, it’s often useful to include the file path and line number for context. This plugin makes it easy to copy lines with this metadata. It is easier to understand the context of the code snippet when the file path and line number are included. Otherwise you have to do it manually. Copying snippet, then adding the line number (what if it is long config file? it is boring). We can automate it and do not waste our time.

lazy_names gem, how much time do you spend in console?

Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to share the lazy_names gem!
This gem allows you to define a config file that maps long, namespaced constants to something simpler and more intuitive:

'Models::Users::CreditCard': 'UserCard'

I spend a lot of time in the console, which is why I originally wrote this gem. Here’s a quick look at my most frequently run commands from my Zsh history:

$: history | awk '{$1=""; print $0}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
 647 gs
 135 rc # rails console
 135 ls
 134 gd
 ...

Do you use the Ruby console much while developing? I personally like to check my code directly in the console — calling methods to inspect return values — especially in the early development stage before tests are written. Sometimes, I need to drop records from the database or build some structs on the fly.