IT and software leaders at healthcare organizations are feeling the pressure to deliver software faster while maintaining compliance and reliability. Our recent healthcare software delivery research (coming soon!) found that 68% of organiza…
For more than a decade, Upcase was where thoughtbot taught Ruby on Rails. You’d work through a trail, get stuck, watch one of us solve the same problem, and come out a little sharper. Thousands of developers used it to take “junior” out of
I have been working on an app that still sits on React Native 0.77 and the old architecture. Slowly, as I was getting a grip on the new architecture, one of the first big refactors was related to the navigation. We were using JavaScript sta…
The London Ruby User Group’s July meetup is this Monday, 13 July at 6:00pm at GoCardless’s offices near Farringdon and Barbican tube stations. Former-thoughtbotter Ismael Celis will talk about reactive command-oriented apps in Ruby, followe…
We wanted to illustrate the difference between a vibe coded website and what a thoughtbot designer can produce. We also wanted to highlight the risk vibe coding poses to your business. So to demonstrate these points, we redesigned a vibe co…
Roux is thoughtbot’s new CSS framework, created by Elaina Natario. Roux is being used by thoughtbotters and non-thoughtbot contributors. It’s simple and modern and we love it. But we still had an itch Roux didn’t scratch. thoughtbot develop…
With our 23rd anniversary happening this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what should happen to thoughtbot after I’m gone, and what the next generation of thoughtbot ownership and governance looks like. The most common path for…
You know the drill if you’ve validated the same rule on a few attributes. One presence validation is one matcher, and five of them turn into five nearly identical lines that don’t tell the next reader much: it { is_expected.to validate_pres…
Recently I stopped a group of flaky tests from running in CI. 60% of CI runs were failing because of this group, which was unsustainable. Three weeks later I was able to restore that group to CI, with 0% failures on main1 resulting. Our “no…
Playwright ships with a black-box recorder that records every detail of every test, giving you a treasure trove of information for debugging flaky tests. Most Rails apps I’ve worked on don’t use it. It’s called the Trace Viewer, and if you’…
Brighton Ruby 2026 will take place in a few days and the thoughtbot team will be there to meet you all in real life, learn from all the great talks, and enjoy a day by the English coast. We love Brighton Ruby and enjoyed it for many years.
The checklist I expected Last week I attended a workshop on neuroinclusivity in learning design. I expected to come away with a checklist. Use larger fonts Send slides in advance Offer cameras off Use a dyslexia-friendly typeface Instead, t…