28 articles by Xavier Redó
How we safely upgraded a legacy Rails app with limited tests
Upgrading a 150k-line Rails monolith with low test coverage is risky. We avoided a "big bang" by using progressive rollouts and bot traffic to ensure a stable, incident-free migration.
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How we made Plausible analytics work with ad blockers
To combat analytics data loss caused by ad-blockers, we implemented a custom Ruby on Rails proxy to route Plausible requests through our own backend. This privacy-friendly approach ensures we capture reliable traffic insights while fully respecting our visitors' data and privacy.
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Context is everything with LLMs and AI assistants
This might sound obvious to some, and maybe others are a bit late to the party, but one thing you have to take into account is this: context changes everything when working with LLMs and AI assistants. There is a massive difference between using ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or any other LLM in isolati
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Always use a .dockerignore in your projects
A missing .dockerignore slows down deployments and risks exposing sensitive data. Learn why this small but critical file is as essential as .gitignore.
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AI code agents and Typed Languages
AI code agents work best with typed languages. Better inference, safer refactors, and clearer APIs make typing feel like leverage rather than bureaucracy.
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React vulnerability (CVE-2025-66478): How we responded and what you should do
A critical React SSR vulnerability (CVE-2025-66478, CVSS 10.0) allows remote code execution. We have swiftly patched all active React/Next.js client projects. Users must apply the official fix immediately.
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MCP Introduces a new standard for interactive AI interfaces
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) community has introduced a new proposal called “MCP Apps” that aims to standardize how interactive user interfaces are built and shown inside AI assistants. This matters because interactive components already existed in practice, but there wasn’t a common MCP-level
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How MarsBased website survived Cloudflare's global outage
After months of regional blocking in Spain, we rebuilt our stack to remove Cloudflare dependencies. Using Render and ImageKit.io, we replaced its performance layer without affecting users. So when Cloudflare went down globally on November 18, our site stayed online.
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Current state of MCP Protocol implementations across programming languages
As part of our ongoing work prototyping and developing MCP servers and LLM applications, we closely follow the different SDKs available, or emerging, for implementing MCP servers and clients in various programming languages. Some of these we’ve tested firsthand, such as TypeScript, Python, and Ruby,
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Switching to Plausible: A privacy-friendly analytics tool for MarsBased
At MarsBased, we value privacy, simplicity, and open‑source tools. We replaced Google Analytics with Plausible, a lightweight, privacy‑first solution. This shift keeps us GDPR‑compliant while still providing the insights we need.
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How AI helped us bring back one-on-ones at MarsBased
With the help of AI, we finally solved one of our biggest management challenges at MarsBased, keeping one-on-ones consistent, meaningful, and well-documented across the team.
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Candidates priorities are changing
Candidates' priorities are shifting from methodology and how we work to how we economically manage our company and how we are financed.
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