Recent Discourse blog posts

I’ve contributed a couple of articles recently to the Discourse blog:

• January 2026 - AI can code, but it doesn’t care about quality

  This along with my article My AI appetites are already feeling slightly outdated in such a fast-changing field, but I am still overall happy with my position here. I’ll likely write another article in the next months covering how my AI usage has changed and how I am still using it to produce quality code and user interfaces.

• March 2026 - How we built the upcoming changes system for gradual product rollouts in Discourse

  I’ve been working on this major project along with other responsibilities since September last year. It’s still evolving, but I am happy where it’s at and the reception to the system both internally and externally so far.

My AI appetites

I’d say my overall attitude to using AI for software engineering is still in the “cautious” phase (it gives me the ick when people say bullish and bearish), but more and more I am integrating it into my day-to-day work and responsibilities at Discourse.

In this article, I will go into some things that I am finding AI tooling useful for, and some areas where I wish it would improve, or that I am still finding my feet on. I will also cover how the prevalence of AI affects me as a tech lead and how it impacts our workflows on a product development team. So we are on the same page, I spend most of my time writing Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, Ember, and SQL code.

Cleaning up this blog with AI

It has been several years since I wrote a post on this blog. Part of this is not really feeling like something I have worth articulating here (though that is changing a little lately), but a bigger part is that it felt like a huge amount of work to get this blog into a state where I didn’t feel like it was full of outdated articles and junk metadata. Something a little more current.

Well, we now have a tool that all of us can use to help ease this kind of menial work: AI. So, using ChatGPT, I cleaned house and wrote this article to cover how I did it.

CSV header converters in Ruby

The CSV library in the Ruby stdlib is a really great and easy to use one, and I’ve often used it for data migrations and imports. When importing data I often find it useful to validate the headers of the imported CSV, to ensure that valid columns are provided. Some users may provide columns in different cases to what you expect or with different punctuation (including spaces etc.). To normalize the headers when parsing a CSV, you can use an option passed to new (other methods such a parse, read, and foreach accept the same options) called header_converters. Here is a simple example of how you can convert the headers of the parsed CSV to lowercase:

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###
# Source CSV looks like:
#
# First name,last Name,Email
# Abraham,Lincoln,alincoln@gmail.com
# George,Washington,gwashington@outlook.com

downcase_converter = lambda { |header| header.downcase }
parsed_csv = CSV.parse('/path/to/file.csv', headers: true, header_converters: downcase_converter)
parsed_csv.each do |row|
  puts row['first name']

  # => Abraham
  # => George
end

Simple as that. You can do anything to the headers here. There are also a couple of built in header converters (:downcase and :symbol) that can be used, and an array can be passed as an argument, not just one converter. Converters can also be used for cells in the CSV rows as well, not just headers. The documentation for the Ruby CSV class is quite clear and helpful, take a look to see all the other myriad options for reading and writing CSVs in Ruby.

Originally, I found this solution and tweaked it a bit from this StackOverflow answer - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48894679/converting-csv-headers-to-be-case-insensitive-in-ruby

Per-page background images using prawn and Ruby

Prawn is an excellent PDF generation library for ruby, and we use it for all our PDF needs at work (Webbernet at time of writing). Their manual is some of the best documentation I have read. Recently, I needed to set a different background image on every page of a PDF I was generating.