Max Chernyak

11 Aug, 25 Y Failover to Human Intelligence Should humans be ready to have AI's back?
16 May, 25 Y Getting Answers from a Big PDF with RubyLLM How to use LLM to get answers from a big PDF
20 Nov, 23 Y Long Term Refactors A process for deliberately long refactors
20 Jul, 23 Y 4 Reasons to Leave a Code Comment If you write a comment, better have a good reason
13 May, 23 Y Adventures in Ruby-esque type enforcement Plain Ruby way to enforce types at runtime
22 Nov, 22 Y Rails — narrative vs model centric approach Organize code into short stories
10 Oct, 22 Y Good Engineering is not Premature Optimization Don't misuse the term "premature optimization"
07 Aug, 22 Y Ruby Enumerator.new(size) You can pass size to Enumerator.new
24 Nov, 21 Y Writing Maintainable Code is a Communication Skill Express the "how", "what", and "why" in your code
04 Oct, 21 Y Mindful Code Reviews Mindful code reviews improve engineering culture
13 Sep, 21 Y Don’t Build A General Purpose API To Power Your Own Front End YAGNI
21 Mar, 20 Y 3 Reasons Not To Implicitly Memoize Maintainability, reusability, and performance
04 Aug, 18 Y Don’t use docker to run your app in development Use docker-compose and asdf for local dev
15 Sep, 15 Y Elasticsearch gems and modules, clearly explained Learn what each Elasticsearch gem and module does
18 Jun, 14 Y 6 practices for super smooth Ansible experience Vagrant, ssh, secrets, setup/deploy and more
15 Jun, 14 Y Linux permissions cheatsheet Make sense of chmod flags' behavior
26 Nov, 13 Y CMS Trap Avoid architectural premature optimization
09 Sep, 13 Y Tips on Rails 3 load paths How to use autoload_paths, eager_load_paths, lib
21 Jan, 10 Y Multiple Table Inheritance With ActiveRecord Proof of concept MTI implementation in Rails

Projects

Gem tiny_mcp Make local MCP tools in Ruby and easily serve them
Gem loadout Helpers for vanilla Rails config management
Gem narrative Rails template promoting narrative-centric approach
Gem jira_adf Builder-like syntax for Atlassian Document Format (ADF)
Gem enum_utils Functions for mixing and matching lazy enumerables
Gem wordmap A way to lookup data directly from disk, bypassing RAM
Gem portrayal A minimal builder for struct-like classes in Ruby
Hex cx_leaderboard Elixir library for fast, customizable leaderboards
Gem transformable_list Determine steps to transform a list into another list
Gem redis_collection Sync a ruby enumerable with a redis namespace
Gem skeptick Better ImageMagick for Ruby
Gem blogue A Rails blog engine
Gem kwstruct Ruby struct with keyword arguments
Gem authoraise Boolean authorization without false negatives
Gem menu_txt Build nested menus using plain text syntax
Demo tetris React.js exercise

Specialize in software design and DX (developer experience).
VPE at CTC. Formerly principal at SCF, founder/CTO at Printio.
Natalie’s husband.