Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Upcase has retired, but the learning continues

2026-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

For more than a decade, Upcase was where thoughtbot taught Ruby on Rails. You’d work through a trail, get stuck, watch one of us solve the same problem, and come out a little sharper. Thousands of developers used it to take “junior” out of their title.

We don’t say that lightly. In 2018, we transitioned Upcase from a paid subscription product to a free platform, opening the content to the community. Over time, we’ve continued to rethink how we share what we learn.

Today, we believe open platforms like our blog, podcasts The Bike Shed & Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots, live streams and video channels are better suited to keeping our teaching current, accessible, and connected to the pace of change in software development.

Where to learn Ruby on Rails now

If you’re not sure where to start, start with the blog. It works through the real Rails decisions that don’t have a tidy answer in the docs. When you’re ready to go deeper, our books are free to read. Ruby Science is what we reach for when an app starts to sprawl, and Testing Rails is how a lot of us learned to test. The Bike Shed carries Upcase’s conversational side forward every week, and our open source gems are the same ones we use on client work, out in the open for you to read.

Watch us build

More than anything, Upcase was video, and that content now lives on our YouTube channel. You’ll find short clips to watch on a break and longer tutorials for when you want to go deeper on a topic.

The one to start with is AI in Focus, the closest thing to sitting beside a thoughtbot developer as they solve a real problem in real time. Every week, thoughtbot founder, Chad Pytel, and Development Lead, Louis Antonopoulos, explore AI coding in real time, how LLMs integrate into Rails applications and what it takes to turn AI ideas into production-ready software.

Thank you

To everyone who built, contributed to, or learned through Upcase, thank you. You’re what made it meaningful and your curiosity, feedback, and enthusiasm shaped it over the years.

We look forward to the next chapter in sharing what we learn, as we learn it - and we hope you’ll continue to join us on that journey.

The Bike Shed Ep 506: The Muppet Software Team

2026-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

This week’s episode is a radical one, let’s Muppet-cast a software development team!

Migrating to native stack navigation, with a surprise from iOS 26

2026-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

I have been working on an app that still sits on React Native 0.77 and the old architecture. Slowly, as I was getting a grip on the new architecture, one of the first big refactors was related to the navigation.

We were using JavaScript stack navigators, so the plan was to move everything over to native stack navigators. We migrated all of our JavaScript stack navigators across to the native stack. Then I opened the app on a device running the new iOS version and got a little surprise.

Liquid Glass

Because the native stack uses the real iOS navigation components under the hood, the app suddenly picked up the new Liquid Glass styling from iOS 26. The app is not ready for it. Nothing had been designed with that look in mind, and it clashed with everything we had, especially the top left arrow back icon and the logo in the middle.

The quick way to opt out is a single key in Info.plist:

UIDesignRequiresCompatibility

That tells iOS to keep rendering the app in the older compatibility style until we are ready to embrace the new design properly.

And another surprise

With Liquid Glass disabled, I thought I was done. Instead, our logo in the navigation bar now looked clipped. The top and bottom were being cut off, and it looked broken.

I spent a long time going in rounds on this one. I used Claude for ideas and, being honest, the suggestions were not useful at all this time. Every answer pushed me back towards a JavaScript based navigator, which was exactly the thing I had just spent time moving away from. After a lot of back and forth I was no closer.

Sometimes a good old Google search is enough

In the end, I found the answer in someone else’s blog post.

The iOS navigation bar is exactly 44pt tall. Our logo in the header was 55pt. Even with Liquid Glass disabled, the underlying iOS component is fixed at 44pt and there is nothing we can do to change that. Anything taller than the bar simply gets clipped.

I was quite confused about why we never had this issue? Before the migration, our header was a custom JavaScript header, and on older iOS versions a title view that was bigger than the bar just spilled over the edges and looked fine. The platform tolerated it.

We were never really allowed to use a 55pt logo. The old setup just happened to put up with it. iOS 26, going through the real native bar, stopped being so forgiving and clipped the logo the way it was probably always meant to.

How to fix it

The fix in the end was straightforward. We render a smaller logo for devices on iOS 26 or higher and keep the normal logo for everything else, including older iOS versions and Android. It is not glamorous, but it respects what the platform actually allows rather than fighting it.

If you move from React Navigation’s JS stack navigator to native stack navigator and your header looks off on newer iOS, check the height of whatever you are putting in the bar. 44pt is the limit.

Past and present thoughtbotters at LRUG this Monday

2026-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

The London Ruby User Group’s July meetup is this Monday, 13 July at 6:00pm at GoCardless’s offices near Farringdon and Barbican tube stations.

Former-thoughtbotter Ismael Celis will talk about reactive command-oriented apps in Ruby, followed by me (Fritz Meissner) on fixing long-standing flakiness in Capybara tests, and how AI did and did not help.

There’s an introduction to my talk at this blog post. At the meetup you can expect more detail on the flaky tests themselves and on the interaction with Claude Code that lead to the breakthrough.

Space is limited to 50 people, so register on the LRUG site if you’d like to come. If you’re there, come and say hello.