You can't spell "Zeitwerk" without "twerk"
I've been slacking on the blogging. I've been writing here a bit, but until this week I hadn't put out a single blog post in 2025. I fixed that, but only time will tell if I can get back into the habit of writing more regularly.
Code Reloading for Rack Apps | Jared Norman
Rails gives us wonderful and reliable code reloading via Zeitwerk, but what do we do when we want that outside of our Rails apps?
I've been doing a bunch of work on Ruby web applications without Rails. I've got a lot of opinions about how to structure applications. Working directly on top of Rack let's me explore different designs and see how my decisions play out.
It also makes for some very fast applications. (Yes, I know I could just build stuff in Go or something, but I'd rather work in Ruby.) Rails is amazing and I love it for the productivity it affords me in most of the work I do, but taking a break it gives me room to learn how various things work under the hood.
If you're not using Rails, you might still need caching, XSRF-protection, multi-database support, and more. Each of those is an opportunity to learn how those features work.
In writing this week's blog post, I got a little further into handling concurrency in Ruby. Previous sites I'd built actually had race conditions around the code reloading that I didn't know about. I don't think I ever hit those race conditions, but from reading GitHub issues and pull requests from the folks that work on Rails, I learned they were there and was able to address them.
My hope is that as I build out this application (which I hope to launch in the fall) I'll write a few more tutorials on how to build out different "framework" features outside of Rails.
I've been listening to a bunch of Wytch Hazel this week. The new record is more of what we've come to expect from them, uplifting Christian hard rock. While the religious angle doesn't do anything for me personally, the vibes are on point. This music makes you feel good.
