![\"Gem](\"https://badge.fury.io/rb/pg_search.svg\"){kind=icon}
After years of using Safari as my personal daily driver web browser, and Firefox Developer Edition for my software development work, I have started experimenting with other browsers.
\nOrion is the most interesting to me. It’s a WebKit-based browser by the Kagi team. I have recently from DuckDuckGo to Kagi as my search engine (per Daring Fireball’s suggestion), because I can pay them a small amount of money and be confident that they will can sustain themselves without having to try to show me ads and otherwise sell me as a product to others. Orion is ambitious in that the team is supporting Firefox/Chrome-style web extensions on top of WebKit. With the complicated way I set things up, it’s been a small bit crashy, so I hope that they are able to continue development and improve it.
\nZen is an interesting open source alternative to Firefox (which has recently been adding a lot of AI cruft). I’m still quite happy with Firefox but I’m open to some new thinking around the browser user experience.
\nI have also been having quite a hard time with Google Meet video calls and Google Sheets spreadsheets. It seems that unfortunately they perform the best only on Blink (Chrome’s engine), but I don’t particularly want to have Chrome installed on any of my devices. So I have been trying out Brave which is an alternative privacy-focused browser based on Blink/Chromium. I’m happy with it so far although it has a lot of AI, VPN, cryptocurrency, and advertising upsells which aren’t a good fit for me, so I have been turning them off.
\nAnd way down the list is Ladybird, which I’m excited about but haven’t tried yet. It’s in a very early phase, but is taking the ambitious route of implementing a new browser engine. The web needs to have diverse engines to stay sustainable and independent of a small number of large corporations.
\nI’m now using Orion as my default, with Zen and Brave getting more and more of my daily use. Trying to cover the major browser engines while balancing privacy, performance, and good UX. I also want something with relatively-good iOS support.
\n", "date_published": "2025-07-02T10:45:54-05:00", "url": "https://blog.nertzy.com/2025/07/02/checking-out-the-new-browser.html", "tags": ["Article"] }, { "id": "http://nertzy.micro.blog/2023/08/09/elixir-yakshaving.html", "title": "Elixir yak-shaving", "content_html": "I’ve finally decided to look into Elixir. I know I will love it! I have started doing the Elixir Koans
\nBut the yak-shaving has already taken over. I haven’t even completed the first koan yet. Instead, I have:
\nBut I’m having fun! And I will have some free time next week to dig deeper into all of these things.
\n", "date_published": "2023-08-09T19:24:44-05:00", "url": "https://blog.nertzy.com/2023/08/09/elixir-yakshaving.html", "tags": ["Status","Article"] }, { "id": "http://nertzy.micro.blog/2020/11/09/pgsearch-at-years.html", "title": "pg_search at 10 years 🎂", "content_html": "Ten years ago today, I pair programmed with Petra Jaros on the first commit for pg_search, my Ruby gem.
\nBack then, I was working at Pivotal Labs in New York on the Casebook project when we were having trouble with a search engine deployment. My client product manager trusted me to spend a month or so of full-time billable hours to put together a new solution to take advantage of the built-in search capabilities of PostgreSQL. We open-sourced it, I wrote a blog post to announce its release, and before long we started to receive improvements from the community.
\nFor the last ten years, I have maintained pg_search as a personal side project, for fun. I have learned quite a bit from maintaining the gem. Every once in a while, our test suite reveals a bug in Rails, which has been fun to investigate and try to fix. In my current job, I was recently able to use pg_search to build a type-ahead autocompleter.
\nOver the years I have released 62 versions of the gem. Most shocking of all, pg_search has been downloaded over 7.6 million times. I am humbled that the Ruby community has been so willing to use my work and contribute improvements over the years. I love free software, and it feels great to both give and receive.
\nThanks to all the other software developers who have reported issues, submitted pull requests, and asked questions on our mailing list.
\nHere’s to the next decade! 🥂
\n
I’ve just updated a couple of my old personal project websites.
\nBoth applications are currently running on Heroku’s free tier. Once I get them modernized enough I may move them to the “Hobby” tier. I also upgraded both from their ancient Cedar-10 stack.
\n", "date_published": "2020-05-03T17:16:04-05:00", "url": "https://blog.nertzy.com/2020/05/03/ive-just-updated.html", "tags": ["Microblog","Status","Article"] }, { "id": "http://nertzy.micro.blog/2020/02/23/today-at-indiewebcamp.html", "content_html": "Today at IndieWebCamp 2020 Austin I’m figuring out what my personal site nertzy.com has on it and running it through indiewebify.me to get some basics like h-card set up. After that, I’ll be looking into social reader apps. 🤓
\n", "date_published": "2020-02-23T16:06:55-05:00", "url": "https://blog.nertzy.com/2020/02/23/today-at-indiewebcamp.html", "tags": ["Microblog","Status","Article"] }, { "id": "http://nertzy.micro.blog/2020/02/22/everyone-is-presenting.html", "content_html": "Everyone is presenting their personal websites. I just hopped up and presented nertzy.com and how I have copies of my older blogs at http://old.nertzy.com and http://old.nertzy.com/old/ and how I want to merge that old content into my site someday.
\n", "date_published": "2020-02-22T12:23:54-05:00", "url": "https://blog.nertzy.com/2020/02/22/everyone-is-presenting.html", "tags": ["Microblog","Status","Article"] }, { "id": "http://nertzy.micro.blog/2020/02/02/at-t-at.html", "content_html": "At T22 at 2:02 on 2/2/2020 (@ Tumble 22 in Austin, TX) via Swarm
\n", "date_published": "2020-02-02T15:03:00-05:00", "url": "https://blog.nertzy.com/2020/02/02/at-t-at.html", "tags": ["Microblog","Status","Article"] } ] }