A handful of things that caught my attention this week.

1. It’s Alive

I originally started this site with all the best intentions to blog about various side projects. Well, except for two posts over four years, that never really happened. But circumstances change and now we find ourselves having started up an LLC, completely rebuilt the site with a new design and logo, launched a poorly stocked drop-shipping merch shop, and spinning up this weekly series of (hopefully) Fascinating things. If this seems interesting to you, then why not sign up at the bottom of this page or subscribe to the RSS feed.

2. Real World Rails

This GitHub repo contains some 200-odd open source Rails applications and engines. It doesn’t just link to them – it contains them – the thinking being that you can point your coding agent at this treasure trove of projects and ask questions about it. I’m not sure how helpful this actually is, since the LLMs powering the agents almost certainly trained on this code but, as a giant list of features I can draw inspiration from or build into my own internal or client projects, this seems super valuable.

3. modern.css

This site showcases all the modern CSS techniques that replace the older, hackier methods of yesteryear. While I generally keep up with new CSS properties and selectors, I learnt a ton poking around here. Many of things that required JavaScript in the past can now be done with pure CSS (see also this x86 CPU made in CSS). It’s definitely worth spending an afternoon on this site.

4. microgpt

Andrej Karpathy wrote up a comprehensive “brief guide” (his words, not mine) to his latest project which is a 200-line, zero-dependency, Python script that trains and inferences a (micro) GPT. The source is available in this Gist. There’s loads of goodness in the comments on the Gist too, including this browser-based version with different training datasets. I’m hoping to spend some time this coming weekend translating this to Ruby to help with my own understanding of the underlying principles.

5. Campfire

Last weekend I volunteered to be a responsible adult for Campfire Phoenix which was hosted by HeatSync Labs. We had three teams building games, and they all managed to publish and submit. There was a platformer with neat features like coyote time and wall jumping, a 3d-maze game with procedurally generated maps, and a ship survival game with a high score table. If helping kids learn to code, or build electronics, is your jam, keep an eye on Hack Club for events near you.