Avi Flombaum

Rethink Everything

Ten essays on what I've changed my mind about since agents started writing my code

Almost every best practice I taught was an optimization for the human programmer. The human isn't the one writing the code anymore, so I'm rethinking all of it: DRY, the testing pyramid, rewrites, microservices, types, native apps, and who we optimize code for.

I Built My Nephew a CCAT Coach

My nephew had to take the CCAT to get an internship. So I built him a practice app in less than a day. He started using it right away, and every time he told me something was missing or annoying or...

Hello World, Again

The first time I signed onto the internet, I knew I wanted to spend my life building things and expressing myself in this medium. So in 2001, before WordPress existed, an intrepid 16-year-old named...

Project Live

Clever Cat Prep

Rethink Everything

Ruby on Rails

Building a Bulletproof Analytics System for Rails 8 and Turbo

Most analytics implementations in Rails apps are fragile. They break when you add Turbo. They fire twice on redirects. They miss events entirely when users navigate via Turbo Drive. I spent a week ...

Climbing Movies

My favorite rock climbing movies

Climbing Movies is a hand-curated library of climbing films that are legitimately free to watch online. Every film is embedded from the channel that made it, whether that is Reel Rock, Patagonia, Mellow, Louder Than Eleven, or a climber's own upload, and every page links back to the source. There are no accounts, no fees and no ads. Browse by discipline, climber, country, crag, filmmaker, or start with a curated list. Each film has a short writeup that says what it actually is, so you know whether you are getting a 6 minute ascent film or an hour long documentary before you press play.

Design Previews for Ruby on Rails

I Ran GPT-5 Against My MacBook. The Laptop Won.

I just watched a $3,000 laptop beat OpenAI’s best model at something that actually matters. Not at generating poetry or philosophical musings. Planning a real trip to Ecuador that you could book t...

PromptEngine

Manage AI prompts at scale

Open-source Rails engine for managing AI prompts at scale. Version control, A/B testing, and composable workflows built in.

Leadership

Principles vs Values

Flatiron School grew to 600 employees with incredible retention and NPS. The Product and Engineering team I led was 60 people with incredible culture that built incredible software. Leading that te...

Letters

A Message of Gratitude

Homebaum

Theory

Cosmic Creativity: The Mystical Oneness of Everything

In the age of artificial intelligence, I've come to realize that art is not a fixed thing, but a constantly evolving conversation. A piece of art — whether it's a painting, a song, a piece of writi...

Theory

We Are All Artists

“In the age of artificial intelligence, where algorithms can compose symphonies, write novels, and even paint portraits, it’s easy to question what this means for us as human beings. If machines ca...

Project Launching

VCMatch.ai

Post

An ActiveStorage S3 Direct Uploader: Part 3: Upload Progress

We left off having a functional uploadzone that can handle multiple files and upload them to directly S3. You can drag and drop a file into the zone and it will upload to S3. You can also click the...

Ruby on Rails

An ActiveStorage S3 Direct Uploader: Part 2: Direct Upload to S3

In Part 1 we created a Rails app with ActiveStorage and S3. We also built an uploadzone component that can handle the files and prepare to pass them off to something to upload them. That's where we...

Project Beta

Railspress

Content management the Rails way.

A Rails engine for blogging and content. Rich text editing, SEO metadata, categories, and tags out of the box. Plus an Entity System to manage any model with a simple DSL.

Ruby on Rails

ActiveStorage S3 Direct Uploader: Part 1: Drag and Drop Interface

Generating Audio Waveform Images in Ruby

Socratic Tutor

AI that teaches through questions

AI that teaches through questions, never gives answers. Adapts to frustration levels and learning styles in real-time.

Why I Joined Revature

My Revature Story: Knowing Your Why When I think about motivation, I often turn to a boxing match that took place when I was six. The year was 1990, and Mike Tyson was riding high. He'd won all 37...

Perfect Poetry

ActionVersionPreview

Preview design iterations in Rails

Preview multiple versions of your Rails views simultaneously. No feature flags, no database, no configuration. Just file names and URLs.

Graduating Flatiron School

Monday, June 8th, 2020, was Flatiron School's eighth birthday. Starting Flatiron School with Adam has without a doubt been the most rewarding, challenging, and exciting endeavor of my life so far. ...

Why Teach and Learn Ruby?

As the Co-Founder and Dean of Flatiron School I thought it important to write a response to the recent implication that because a school switched their curriculum focus from Ruby to Java that means...

Slaps.video

Speeches

Fear Nothing.

Why I Started Coding

My mom was an elementary school teacher. Every day after school she’d tutor her students, and I’d have to wait around for her for two hours, playing with my school’s one computer (this was 1993) be...

shadcn-rails

A port off shadcn/ui to rails

Beautifully designed components based on shadcn/ui that you can copy and paste into your apps. Accessible. Customizable. Open Source. Now for Rails

Letters

Thank You Ben Brown and Uber.nu

Letters

A Birthday Letter to My Dad

I wrote this letter to my dad on his birthday 3 years ago. I’m sharing it today to honor him on Fathers’ Day and put a bit of gratitude out in the world. Hi Dad, I’m writing you a letter. I know ...

Project Live

MatchMaker.chat

Online dating in an AI age.

No profile. No chat. Just dates.

What I Wish I Knew Before Teaching Myself How to Code

These days, I get to teach people to program at Flatiron School, but I’m personally self-taught—I’ve been teaching myself teaching myself how to code since fifth grade. Along the way, I’ve found th...

My Favorite Moments in My Career in Technology

JustFuckingStopAlready