Kevin Menard

@[email protected]
276 Followers
117 Following
23 Posts

I'm a Staff Engineer at Shopify where I work on YJIT and TruffleRuby. I care a lot about efficient use of resources, making code fast, and saving humans time by making software smarter.

Historically, I've been active in the Boston startup community. Previously I co-founded Servprise and Mogotest, operating each of those for ~4.5 years each, and have worked at a few other area startups on early engineering teams.

I'm fond of music & enjoy drumming.

Kevin MenardJan 21

RE: https://ruby.social/@truffleruby/115934992839725858

It’s nice that we’re able to craft new TruffleRuby releases on our own schedule again. We’ll be shipping bug fixes faster going forward.

Kevin MenardJan 13

RE: https://ruby.social/@truffleruby/115889733907958716

This is a huge release for TruffleRuby. It’s our first under our new org.

If you’ve been hesitant about contributing because of the CLA, please note that we no longer have one. We can also release more frequently so please report bugs or open PRs.

Kevin MenardSep 2, 2025

This was an unexpected change. RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use. There's no need to apply for an open source license any longer:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2025/09/rubymine-is-now-free-for-non-commercial-use/

RubyMine Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use | The RubyMine Blog

RubyMine, a JetBrains IDE for Ruby and Rails, is now free for non-commercial use! Learn more in the blog post.

The JetBrains Blog
Kevin MenardAug 23, 2025

I know double-quoted strings are the norm in many Ruby style guides, but I just can't get used to them. Single-quoted strings look nicer, IMHO, and are easier to type for anyone with RSI on a standard keyboard layout. I think they're a huge DX win for Ruby.

To that end, I really appreciate rubocop-rails-omakase's generated .rubocop.yml being so welcoming to rule tweaking instead of being militant about "the one true way".

Kevin MenardMar 21, 2025

Working with BackBlaze B2 and ActiveStorage gave me a flashback to when I spent months adding mock implementations of S3 versioning to Fog. It was a lot of tedium working out exactly how S3 would respond because actual API responses often conflicted with the documentation. API errors that Amazon documented as being impossible would happen sporadically, but regularly.

PRs for those interested:

* https://github.com/fog/fog/pull/672
* https://github.com/fog/fog/pull/681

I kinda miss working on Fog and Rubber.

S3 versioning improvements by nirvdrum · Pull Request #672 · fog/fog

I implemented S3 versioning mocking in all the necessary requests (at least I think so). This is a rather large changeset, so I'd appreciate feedback. I held off on the model changes for now ...

GitHub
Show threadKevin MenardFeb 22, 2025

So far, I'm really enjoying it. But, also struggling a bit with outdated modes of thinking on some parts. I'm trying to use an LLM as a code buddy, too, to build up that skill. But, I never know if it's giving me info that's idiomatic for Rails 7+ or if I'm getting data scraped from an old, undated blog post targeting Rails 4.

In any event, not having to deal with asset pipeline is great. Stimulus is really compelling. I haven't deployed yet, but Kamal looks a lot nicer than Capistrano.

Kevin MenardFeb 22, 2025

I've been working on Ruby implementations for a long time. I got started with some basic Ruby Enterprise Edition stuff a long time ago, then JRuby, then TruffleRuby, then CRuby (most of this was actually at the same time). One of the challenges with dedicating time to the VM internals is you can fall behind what Rubyists are actually doing. So, I'm building a Rails 8 app from scratch for a friend.

I've contributed to Rails apps, but this is the first one I'm spinning up from scratch in a while.

Show threadKevin MenardFeb 22, 2025

@mcphat It still has some quirks and I run EAP builds. But, I'm pretty happy with it. Alas, Copilot often lags EAP.

The biggest annoyance is the chat box tries to pair up quotes. So, when I type a contraction in English there's a trailing `'` that I need to delete. I'm sure they'll fix it soon.

I've heard good things about CodeBuddy + JetBrains tooling, but I haven't tried that one out yet. I don't care for GitHub-based login and the pricing is confusing, but that could be worth checking out.

Kevin MenardFeb 21, 2025

The JetBrains AI stuff was really not that good when I used it over the summer, but it's really come into its own. I've used it pretty extensively with RubyMine, CLion, and IntelliJ over the past couple of weeks. It has a really nice full IDE integration that VS Code + Copilot can't match. It's great being able to select an undocumented function and have it explain the code.

What's really neat on the Rails side is it'll auto-add more context using knowledge about the structure of Rails apps.

Kevin MenardNov 14, 2024
If you’re at #RubyConf2024 and are interested in TruffleRuby, please feel free to reach out. I’m happy to chat and look at code.