Blog

It's been a rough spring. We lost 45 pullets to raccoons over the past month and change. We were looking at a great egg-laying flock, and they are simply gone. 

After we had lost the first batch, I had set up a catch trap, but a raccoon literally broke the door (bent the sheet metal in half), busting out. I set up a blind and got a pot shot off at one, but they show up at dark, and I'm not equipped with FLIR or other technology for that work.

We called in our local trapper, Steve Colvin (of Colvin Animal Damage Control ), and set up traps and waited. We caught one and thought we might be through the worst of it, but they came back. So we kept running the traps. 

To date, we've caught five adult raccoons and two adult possums, all working the coop. 

I never…

I recently moved a Scouting WordPress site off of Flywheel and onto a Dokku box I run myself. The migration went fine. That is a different post. The migration left me with a problem Flywheel used to solve for free: when something breaks at 11pm, how do I find out before a member/volunteer does?

I've been using AppSignal for a very long time for all my Rails apps. They shipped a PHP integration recently, and it hit my "to do" list for the migration. The catch, which became the whole adventure: AppSignal for PHP supports Laravel and Symfony. WordPress appears nowhere in their documentation. WordPress appears nowhere in anyone's documentation. It is the eternal special case, a composer-less, framework-less island that also happens to run half the web.

This is the story of bolting the two together anyway. It works, and works well: real per-request traces with database query spans…

Back in April, John opened Blue Ridge Ruby 2026 with a talk that had very little to do with the things you usually see on a Ruby conference stage. No benchmarks, no framework upgrades, no live coding. Instead, photographs of trees. Forests. His own land. The talk, Learning from Permaculture: Sustainable Software Development, drew on twelve-plus years of farming with permaculture and twenty-plus years of designing and building software to ask a simple question: what does the garden know about building things that last?

The recording is now live on RubyEvents, and we wanted to mark the occasion, in part because of how the room received it and in part because of the company it kept.

Permaculture starts from a few principles that sound almost too simple to be useful: observe before you act, produce no waste, value the margins. Anyone who has inherited a large codebase knows the…