Top all-time · #2073
Ryan Bigg
Personal blog · ryanbigg.com · on HN as ryanbiggprogrammingweb
Ryan Bigg's personal blog at ryanbigg.com covers programming and web. Since 2010, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “Quitting Open Source”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
About me
Most-linked posts?
- Quitting Open Source4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-11-16
- Hiring Juniors3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-04-27
- /books2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-18
- Want it? Give. (Plea to Rails Developers)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-10
- My thoughts on Hanami2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-08
- Rails' CurrentAttributes Considered Harmful2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-22
- Congratulations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-19
- Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-25
- Rails Guides: Asset Pipeline2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-18
What Hacker News says?
Maintained Spree as it’s community manager ( https://GitHub.com/spree/spree ) for 2.5-3 years, depending on how you count. Taught me a lot about OSS. Dollar figures processed using code I wrote / maintained hurt my brain. What hurt my brain more was US sales tax rules. I also wrote quite a few programming books ( https://ryanbigg.com/books ) and some of the Ruby on Rails guides. These have gone on to teach thousands…
Comment linking /books
on “Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?”Submitted MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy as a story · 655 points
HN discussionRuby? No. Rails? Perhaps. (Both github and gitlab are built with ruby on rails). For an old post on a somewhat related topic, see: https://ryanbigg.com/2009/04/how-rails-works-2-mime-types-re... I could imagine the mix of rails #respond_to and "file extensions" at the end of urls might make a mess (think /users/profile/smith.html vs /smith vs /smith.json vs /smith.txt - essentially what might have been /smith?format…
Comment linking /2009/04/how-rails-works-2-mime-types-respond_to
on “Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed”Submitted Leaving Tech as a story · 178 points
HN discussionOn the topic of copy editing you raise: I wrote a book in DocBook for Manning in 2010. DocBook is XML, so I structured it with opening / end tags on their own line, content in the middle. As you would with a HTML document. After copy editing multiple chapters, they sent it back to me with all the content on a single line. I was so incredibly upset that they ditched all my painstaking format that I almost abandoned t…
Comment linking /2015/08/my-self-publishing-success-story
on “The Story Behind “100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them””Submitted Death of Matt Lightner (creator of Site5) as a story · 86 points
HN discussionI have written a few tech books: https://ryanbigg.com/books Off these, I’ve made $65,000USD. That’s over 13 years. None of these books have sold anywhere near as close to the Unicorn Project! (Which imo is fanfic for the tech-inclined) The money is nice, but hearing from people who’ve read the books (especially those who ask questions!) is the best part. Huh, maybe it is the friends we make along the way after all.
Comment linking /books
on “The economics of writing technical books”Submitted Want it? Give. (Plea to Rails Developers) as a story · 86 points
HN discussionI agree with what you've written. At the same time, the article author looks like he's the kind of person that gets into the nitty gritty of the tech details given the books he's written, https://ryanbigg.com/books . So the thing that I think is inherently super shitty is that it's likely that many of the frontier models were trained on his books . So his expertise at code and architecture details is exactly the kin…
Comment linking /books
on “Leaving Tech”Submitted Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You as a story · 78 points
HN discussionIs this satire? Ragebait to draw attention to your looking for work page ( https://ryanbigg.com/work )? It's really well written!
Comment linking /work
on “Leaving Tech”Submitted A Replacement for Strong Parameters as a story · 37 points
HN discussionIf you want to get up and running on Ubuntu I've found that this is a great way: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you
Comment linking /2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you
on “Rails Installer - Get up and running on Windows”Submitted Dollars to Documentation - Donate to help document Rails as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI posted the following guide the other day: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you Sadly it languished with no upvotes. :( I found it extremely useful, however!
Comment linking /2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you
on “Get Ruby and Rails running on Ubuntu with one command”Submitted Authentication doesn't belong in your Rails Engine as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI know it can be frustrating to have a software not work as expected but, I don't think Ubuntu is doing too bad in this respect (I have been using Kubuntu @ work and Fedora at home for the past 2-3 years). The author IMO is a bit too harsh on Ubuntu. On a somewhat related note, I think people should also read this while passing judgement on another OSS (esp bug fixes): http://ryanbigg.com/2010/04/want-it-give/ http:…
Comment linking /2010/04/want-it-give/
on “Ubuntu Is A Poor Standard Bearer For Linux”Submitted When rails 3 is due? as a story · 14 points
HN discussionCheck out the Ruby on Rails guide on the subject: http://ryanbigg.com/guides/asset_pipeline.html DHH also talked a lot about it in his keynote this year at RailsConf: http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-keynote-streaming-live-from-ra...
Comment linking /guides/asset_pipeline.html
on “Sprockets 2.0.0 released (Ruby/Rack asset packaging)”Submitted Quitting Open Source as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI follow this guide to set up rvm, ruby, and rails: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/
Comment linking /2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/
on “Help with Rails?”Submitted Qutting Open Source as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis makes me incredibly sad. Once upon a time I wrote a story about a person who didn't use TDD and how he suffered: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/02/congratulations/
Comment linking /2010/02/congratulations/
on “Introducing Developer Driven Development (DDD)”Submitted One year with the Ergodox EZ as a story · 10 points
HN discussionhttps://ryanbigg.com I usually write posts about code, but this post about culture and values really resonated with a lot of people: https://ryanbigg.com/2021/12/culture-and-values
Comment linking /2021/12/culture-and-values
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Ryan Bigg Resigns from Open Source Work as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Tour of Twist as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tailwind Has Won as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hiring Juniors as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted They Fixed the Keyboard as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
