I recently setup fastlane for one of my indie apps, Taxatio, to automate uploading builds and metadata to the App Store — by far, one of the most tedious tasks of app development. While I had used fastlane extensively before when working on teams at companies, I had never actually set it up from scratch. In this post, I want to share how to do that, as well as a lightweight configuration that I think works well for solo indie developers — folks on a team of one!

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After upgrading to macOS Ventura, I decided to upgrade my Ruby version and ran into issues trying to build my site locally.

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When GitHub actions first launched, the recommended way to cache your Bundler dependencies was to use GitHub’s cache action. However, that is no longer the case. You should be using the Ruby team’s setup-ruby action instead.

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Lately I’ve been upgrading and making improvements to my website and blog. As part of that work, I was updating and refining how my RSS feed gets generated with Jekyll. And then I realized something that I had not given much thought to previously. When including the full content of blog posts in an RSS feed, if you link to other posts or pages on your site should you be using absolute URLs or are relative URLs ok?

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Part of the joy of having a ‘bare bones’ DIY host is that sometimes you have to figure shit out on your own. I am not a great web developer, nor a Ruby expert. But, I learn more each time something breaks — you know, Type II fun. Most recently, I came to understand and fix a new error on my web server: env: ruby26: No such file or directory.

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Out of nowhere today, when I tried to run pod install on my machine, it could not be found. Uh… what?

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This site used to be hosted via GitHub Pages, but I decided to move to a dedicated host to have more control over how I develop and deploy the site, and how it’s configured. A number of limitations and quirks eventually drove me to migrate away from GitHub pages to my excellent and inexpensive bare-bones host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I was also interested in learning to do all of this on my own, rather than relying on GitHub Pages “magic”. If you’re looking to setup your own Jekyll-powered site, or if you’re looking to migrate off of GitHub Pages, hopefully this is helpful.

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