August 8, 2025

Fifty Episodes of Dead Code

I’ve been doing a bit more writing than usual. I’ve put out three blog posts in the past few weeks, ending a period of (blog) inactivity. I won’t promise that I’ll keep up the pace, but I do have some more in the works.

In particular, I’m working on more tutorials focused on making working on Rack apps (sans Rails) as painless as possible and replicating features that we get for free (or cheap) from Rails itself. The next couple will likely around database pooling in tests and database replication.

My most recent post was a bit of a detour. I tried out an alternative to Rake called Bake. I'm a little torn on it. I prefer how it works over Rake. It's simply more Ruby-y. (Is there a Ruby equivalent of Python's "pythonic"?)

Despite that, I do think there's value in using the tried and tested de facto community standard tool for most projects. Because of that, I'm not considering moving any of my projects over to Bake. I am going to use it on one project at Super Good to see how that goes. So far, so good.

Let's Get Baked | Jared Norman

Rake is great, but is Bake better? Let's go through setting it up on a new project to see!

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I recorded Dead Code's fiftieth episode this week. We're doing a little giveaway to celebrate, but you'll have to listen to the episode when it drops to find out how to enter. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, if you haven't already.

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I might have actually put this album in a previous Skill Issue, but who cares. I'm training for a half marathon in the fall, and when I run I often listen to music. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Fit for an Autopsy. Metalcore isn't usually my thing, but it makes for great running music.

If you need some misanthropic, angry music for you next workout, give their latest record a spin. If you want to follow along on my running journey, feel free to follow me on Strava¹.