Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
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joel.drapper.me
Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
@joel.drapper.me
I’m a Ruby/TypeScript/CSS engineer at @plane.com and based in the UK. https://joel.drapper.me

I’m building a Ruby/SQLite serverlesslessness framework. I also maintain @phlex.fun.

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If the Rails Foundation tried to take Rails from its maintainers, I would stand up for the maintainers, despite my political differences.

Rails is not owned by the Rails Foundation in the same way RubyGems projects were not owned by Ruby Central.

And neither are legitimately owned by Ruby Core.
Trump is lying. I analysed the shooting of Renee Good frame-by-frame.

The shooter had been in front of her car and appeared to be using his phone to video her while she reversed slowly with her wheels steering hard left.
January 8, 2026 at 3:59 AM
Happy new year.

If any Americans are wondering whether regular peaceful Europeans like me are ready to fight and die defending Greenland from a US invasion, we are.

I will join the UK armed forces immediately if Greenland invokes Article 5 as a consequence of a US attack.
US discussing options to acquire Greenland, including use of military - White House
It came as European allies rallied behind Denmark after renewed US insistence it must have Greenland.
www.bbc.com
January 6, 2026 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Plain HTML and CSS can be beautiful.

Stay tuned 👀
December 30, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Alongside the Ruby 4.0 release last week, I published charm-ruby over Christmas, bringing @charm.land's excellent terminal UI libraries to Ruby.

A full TUI framework, reusable components, styled output, forms, markdown rendering, spinners, charts, and a lot more!

Demos below ⬇️
December 30, 2025 at 5:40 AM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Hey! I'm very excited to announce!

We've got a brand new Programming Ruby 4.0 out just in time for the upcoming release:

pragprog.com/titles/ruby6...

Obviously this is a beta release (written off of RC2), but there will be a second beta right on the heels of the release next week.
Programming Ruby 4 (6th edition)
Code Ruby, Be Happy!
pragprog.com
December 18, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
SVG icons have been "solved" myriad ways, but I find them all lacking.

Inline SVGs? Bloated DOM.
<img> tags? Can't change colors.
Icon fonts? Blurry at certain sizes, a11y issues.
CSS background-image? Still can't change colors.

But, today there's actually a perfect solution...
December 17, 2025 at 7:21 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Senator Chris Murphy speaks the truth! Trump's Ukraine "peace deal" is just a mafia corruption scheme to enrich Trump's family and friends by selling out Ukraine.
December 10, 2025 at 6:51 PM
I released a beta version of a new library that provides open source icon sets as Tailwind v4 utility classes. You get predictions from Tailwind’s language server and Tailwind includes only the icons you actually use. Currently shipping with Bootstrap and Tabler icon sets. github.com/joeldrapper/...
GitHub - joeldrapper/maskicons
Contribute to joeldrapper/maskicons development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
December 10, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
The ruby open source software community. Very condensed version: ruby programming libraries are called gems. Gems are distributed via rubygems (like npm for node, pip for python, etc. it the trusted source that distributes packaged dependencies). Contd in what is hopefully not too long a thread.
December 4, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Double-dashed IDs and the enhanced `attr()` CSS function allow us to bind popovertargets with their popovers without having to create distinct anchor-names.

Learn more at MDN: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/... and developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/...

#StylishHTML
December 5, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Working with Ruby Central in any capacity — on the program committee, as a speaker, sponsor or attendee is a big “fuck you” to the open source Ruby community.

Ruby Central is not worth your time. Please avoid them. Please don’t work with them. Don’t sponsor them. Don’t buy their tickets.
RubyConf is a community-built experience. Our Program Committee reads, debates, and thoughtfully selects the talks that shape the heartbeat of RubyConf. Applications open now through December 22. Help shape the conversations that will guide the ecosystem into 2026 + beyond. forms.gle/ah5H3kx78iS2...
December 4, 2025 at 10:16 PM
I have a 100% vibe-coded Slim to ERB converter that I’ve used to convert hundreds of templates. I will not be maintaining it going forward, but if folks are interested, I could publish a copy that you can use at your own risk.

It could save you a lot of time if you’re doing a Slim → ERB conversion.
December 3, 2025 at 2:23 PM
Do not donate to these lying thieves. They are not good for the Ruby community.

Don’t go to Ruby Conf either.
It's Giving Tuesday! Don't forget to check in with your company to see if they use Benevity; a 30-second search for "Ruby Central Inc" could unlock matching funds that go directly toward strengthening Ruby’s open-source foundation and developer community.
December 2, 2025 at 11:19 PM
This is just what it’s like to review PRs in GitHub now. There’s only a small chance to see the code, it’s not guaranteed — assuming you can even load the page. Well done GitHub. 👏 You had one job.
December 2, 2025 at 12:07 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars...

Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools
November 27, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
November 25, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Could it be any clearer Trump is just Putin's puppet?
Or that the plan is just to make it easier for Russia to attack Ukraine the next time?
How can US people live with themselves knowing their president is just the puppet of a serial genocide maker?
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...
Zelenskyy says Ukraine has impossible choice as Trump pushes plan to end war
US president demands that Kyiv accepts plan that would mean giving up territory to Russia
www.theguardian.com
November 22, 2025 at 8:33 AM
@raycast.com is there any way to stop search results from jumping around? It doesn’t even jump around consistently. I means you can’t do it with muscle memory, you have to visually look at the results each and every time you use it.
November 21, 2025 at 3:48 PM
GitHub’s web performance on pull requests is so bad and just getting worse. What should I switch to?
November 20, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
The Ruby extension for @zed.dev just got better! Huge thanks to @marcoroth.dev for adding `zed-comment` support (including all ERB languages) and RBS inline syntax highlighting!

You can find full release notes at github.com/zed-extensio...
Release v0.16.0 · zed-extensions/ruby
What's Changed Add support for zed-comment by @marcoroth in #203 chore(deps): update pnpm to v10.20.0 by @renovate[bot] in #201 Add zed-comment support for all ERB languages by @marcoroth in #205 ...
github.com
November 11, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦
Today's free Phlex on Rails video is all about rendering, which is very polymorphic in Phlex.

Partials, strings, values, components, component classes, and collections all Just Work™ when passed into the `render` method.
Rendering
This video course teaches you how to use Phlex to build high quality Rails frontends that you can use with existing Erb apps or go all-in and build from the ground up with components. Phlex brings san...
beautifulruby.com
November 10, 2025 at 5:19 PM
I shared a bit more detail about the morphing algorithm in Morphlex here. I also released Morphlex 1.0. joel.drapper.me/p/morphlex/
Better DOM Morphing with Morphlex
joel.drapper.me
November 7, 2025 at 11:45 AM
I’ve fully switched to Jujutsu and don’t see myself ever going back to Git. github.com/jj-vcs/jj
GitHub - jj-vcs/jj: A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful
A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful - jj-vcs/jj
github.com
November 7, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦