Blog on fabiorehm.com

Pi + Ollama Cloud API: Setup and First Impressions

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I found out about pi and gave it a shot I loved it, it “just works” and the UX is very well thought out. Some folks have even been saying it’s like “vim for agentic coding” which I’m starting to agree with.

I think I first came across it before the “OpenClaw boom” when someone shared this post by its author on some social media feed and last week I put some effort into making it a first class citizen in my stack.

crib: Just Enough Devcontainers

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This picks up where DevPod: SSH-Based Devcontainers Without IDE Lock-in left off.

I’ve been hacking on dev environment tooling since 2013. Ventriloquist and devstep were different takes on the same problem: I want to git clone && cd into a project to start working on it without thinking about infrastructure. Ventriloquist had you declaring platforms and services explicitly in a Vagrantfile using a custom format with no ecosystem, devstep went the other direction with buildpack magic that auto-detected our stack. I recently built yet another one, and how it came together surprised me.

please-make-me-an-app, or not

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I started working with Ruby back in 2009, Linux has been my home and recently I got tired. Not like, angry-tired, but more like the “sigh” of someone who’s been working around missing apps and some ~~shit~~ quirks for like almost 17 years.

The quirks range from Internet Banking that didn’t work properly on Linux (unless I installed some .deb from someone I dunno) to government sites that only worked on Windows for issuing “Notas Fiscais” (basically tax receipts I needed to file as a company). The bottom line is that for a long time people didn’t really care about Linux, the “Year of Linux on Desktop” never arrived to this day.

Our coding agent commits deserve better than Co-Authored-By

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve disabled Claude Code’s Co-Authored-By setting ever since I started using Claude Code, the Claude avatar next to people’s faces on GitHub always felt wrong to me. The coding agent is a tool and I am the one responsible for what it produces and if a bug pops up in prod, Anthropic won’t be the ones on call.

If you’ve never seen that in practice, this is what Claude Code adds to commits it creates by default:

Skip the 'No AI Days' - Flip the Roles Instead

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, I wrote about overcoming my fear that AI tools would make me lazy as a developer. I found Claude Code fit my terminal workflow, and I thought I’d solved the problem by doing augmented coding, not vibe coding, while still being in the “driver’s seat”. Except I wasn’t really driving that much anymore.

I was writing prompts and doing what some call Spec Driven Development with agent-os. I was also reviewing code properly, asking for changes, catching bugs, maintaining standards, etc. But the pattern was always the same: I’d describe what I needed, Claude would implement it, and I’d review. Rinse and repeat. I was spending most of my time reviewing code and writing prompts, but after some time I realized I was writing very little code myself (something I’ve been enjoying doing for almost 20 years now).

Working on Multiple Branches Without Losing My Mind

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is Part 4 of the Modernizing my Terminal-Based Development Environment series.

The Context Switching Problem

Lets imagine that you’re working on a project at work and you need to do one of:

Neovim and LazyVim for Rails Development over SSH

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is Part 3 of the Modernizing my Terminal-Based Development Environment series.

The Editor Setup

When you SSH into a devcontainer, you have two choices: use a terminal-based editor (nvim, vim, nano) or use an IDE with remote development extensions (VS Code and others handle this pretty well). I chose Neovim with LazyVim - a preconfigured Neovim distribution with sane defaults, LSP support, and a plugin ecosystem.

Using Zellij and Claude Code Over SSH

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is Part 2 of the Modernizing my Terminal-Based Development Environment series.

The Setup

I recently switched back to SSH-based development using DevPod for devcontainers (see DevPod post for the devcontainer setup).

DevPod: SSH-Based Devcontainers Without IDE Lock-in

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is Part 1 of the Modernizing my Terminal-Based Development Environment series.

UPDATE (March 2026): I’ve since moved away from DevPod and built crib, a smaller devcontainer runner that uses docker exec instead of SSH.

Background

My team uses devcontainers and they’re great for consistency - everyone gets the same Ruby version, Postgres, Chrome for system tests… It Works ™️. New developers run one command and they’re productive.

Modernizing my Terminal-Based Development Environment

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After over a decade as a “terminal-based developer”, I ended up using Cursor for a while when we decided to make use of devcontainers at work. This series documents how I am “returning to my roots” using modern tools like Zellij, Claude Code, and devcontainers without leaving the command line.

NOTE: This is a living series. I’ll update posts as I discover new patterns, gotchas, and solutions. New posts may be added as the workflow evolves.

I Was Afraid AI Would Make Me Lazy (Turns Out It Just Helped Me Move Forward)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was afraid AI coding tools would make me lazy as a developer. After overcoming my own resistance, I’m now becoming an AI-assisted developer who actually enjoys the process and collaborations coming out of it.

The YAGNI Reality Check

In my opinion, the YAGNI principle - “You Aren’t Gonna Need It” - applies to dev tools just as much as code features. I’ve never been one to jump on every shiny new tool that promises to “revolutionize development.” In my almost 20-year career “working with computers”, I’ve seen many revolutionary tools / frameworks disappear after a short period of time, I’ve lived through the hype cycles of countless “game-changing” tools so AI coding tools felt just like another one of those. I remember when GitHub Copilot came out in 2021 and ChatGPT launched in late 2022, a lot of people got excited about them.

Getting a Bulletproof Desktop Environment with Vagrant and VirtualBox

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A battle-tested guide to Ubuntu 24.04 desktop VMs that actually work

I’m trying to get back to writing. After a long break from blogging, I’ve been tinkering with Ubuntu desktop VMs and hitting the same frustrating issues that probably drove me away from desktop virtualization years ago. But this time I stuck with it, debugged the problems (with some help from Claude Code), and figured out what actually works.

The Problem

Setting up a reliable Ubuntu desktop environment in VirtualBox is harder than it should be. Most tutorials leave you with:

Adventures in Serverless Land to Support a Fight Against Corruption

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As most people in tech know, “serverless” is the new ~~buzzword~~ “hotness” and lots of blog posts/books/utilities/tweets/etc. are being written about it every day. This post outlines my initial experience with serverless computing, the issues I had along the way, and some considerations in case you, like me, are thinking about giving it a try for the first time.

Background

Not many people outside of Brazil might’ve heard about the Serenata de Amor project, but it’s making a lot of noise on this side of the globe. Operação Serenata de Amor is an artificial intelligence and data science project that aims to inform the general public about government corruption and spending (more info can be found at the project’s website and this nice podcast at The Changelog).

Building a minimum viable PhantomJS 2 Docker image

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As part of something I’ve been hacking on the side, I have a need to run a bunch of PhantomJS 2.0 containers on a Docker host. While I could’ve just built an image that includes its binary and consider it done, there is currently a need to build the phantomjs binary from sources for Linux machines. Not only that is a PITA but it also requires us to do some “juggling” to clean up build-time dependencies and it still produces a somewhat large Docker image as a result (something in the ~400mb).

Quick update about some Vagrant plugins

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been following this blog (which hasn’t been updated in a loooong time), chances are that you are likely to be a user of one of the Vagrant plugins I’ve released on the past. What you might not know is that I haven’t been using Vagrant so frequently over the last year or so and haven’t had much time to work on them to put up to the plans I originally had in mind.

Trigger notify-send across the network using HTTP

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I cut the first release of notify-send-http, a tool for triggering notify-send across the network using HTTP. Useful for forwarding notifications from local VMs / Containers to your own computer. It even supports notification icons!

Tested on Ubuntu 14.04 only

Why?

Because I do all of my dev work on virtualized environments and I use guard quite a lot to keep my Ruby tests running when files get changed. The problem is that its builtin notification support will trigger a notify-send inside the virtual environment instead of my machine.

Devstep updates

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The third release of the Devstep Docker image came out last night along with a brand new Golang CLI featuring some very nice improvements and new functionality. The CHANGELOG is here and on this post I’ll cover some exciting new stuff I was able to get in place.

Docker image updates

Starting with the base image updates, the 0.2.0 release dropped from 1.168GB down to 867.7MB MB representing a ~25% reduction on disk usage. This is a big win for those who live short on disk space like me and you can expect it to shrink even more on upcoming releases. If you are interested on updates about that, keep an eye on GH-62.

Running GUI apps with Docker

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

2026 Update: If you’re looking for a more robust solution these days, check out x11docker. I haven’t had a need to try it myself, but it looks like the go-to tool for this kind of thing now.

I’ve been doing all of my real (paid) work on VMs / containers for a while now but when it comes to writing Java code for some projects for university I still need to move away from using vim and install some full blown IDE in order to be productive. This has been bothering me for quite some time but this week I was finally able put the pieces together to run NetBeans in a Docker container so that I can avoid installing a lot of Java stuff on my machine that I don’t use on a daily basis.

Devstep: Development environments powered by Docker and Buildpacks

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Devstep is a relatively new project that I I’ve been working on since February 2014 and had its second release last friday. On its current state, Devstep is a dead simple, no frills development environment builder powered by Docker and the buildpack abstraction that is based around a simple (yet ambitious) goal:

I want to git clone and run a single command to hack on any software project.

Intrigued? Check out the demo below of my “canonical Discourse example” and read on for more.

Get notified of long running CLI tasks completion with 'lmk'

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

lmk is a simple command line tool written in Go that I released last February. I wrote it to draw my attention to a terminal when some long command finishes running.

WTF?!?

Yeah, it may sound silly but how often do you run a command that you know that takes a lot of time to complete, you go do something else and forget that the command was running? Even worse, what about when you get side tracked for a bit longer than you should and when you Alt+Tab to check if the command has finished it actually errored along the way?

So I released a lot of Vagrant plugins... Now what's next?

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

2013 was the year I went 100% on Vagrant, went crazy releasing plugins (10 to be more specific) and ended becoming a Vagrant core commiter back in June. To give you an idea, this is what I’ve released over the year:

vagrant-notify - Released at the end of 2012, but “matured” by beginning of 2013
vagrant-boxen (deprecated) - February 17th
vagrant-lxc - March 12th
vagrant-cachier - May 22nd
vagrant-pristine (deprecated) - July 11th
bindler - (deprecated) Public release on July 15th as Vundler and later renamed to Bindler
vagrant-global-status (deprecated) - August 8th
vocker (deprecated) - August 14th
ventriloquist (deprecated) - September 10th
docker-provider (deprecated) - November 5th

Before you think I’m going nuts, I have a reason behind releasing each plugin and I might blog about that someday but for the scope of this post I’ll focus on what you should expect for each one of them over 2014.

Meet Viewdocs

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week @progrium striked again with one more great example of how we should strive for keeping things simple. Five months after releasing Dokku which is a Docker powered mini-Heroku written in around 100 lines of Bash, he has just open sourced viewdocs:

Easy, elegant project documentation in Markdown using Viewdocs -- Read the Docs meets Gist.io https://t.co/FIDrwPLgKc
— Jeff Lindsay (@progrium) November 11, 2013

As with Dokku, the project is pretty small and (as of this writing) converts ~200 lines of Golang code into a powerful tool for small to medium sized open source projects hosted on GitHub. Viewdocs combines the dynamics of Read the Docs and the simplicity of Gist.io by rendering Markdown on the fly from your repository’s docs directory as simple static pages. It even supports custom layouts and rendering specific git references (like a tag, branch or a specific commit). How cool is that? :)

Set the default Vagrant provider from your Vagrantfile

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There are times that you might need / want to use a specific provider for your Vagrant boxes that differs from VirtualBox or whatever provider you have set on your VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environmental variable.

For experienced Ruby users this might seem something trivial to do but since Vagrant’s community is made of people from many different programming languages background, I thought it would be nice to share this little trick I find useful when I need to make sure the VMs goes up with the right provider.

Getting to know BTRFS

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing a lot with Docker recently and while learning more about it I came across “Another Union File System” (AUFS) + its Copy On Write (COW) capabilities and have been pretty impressed by it. In short, by using a COW + union file system Docker makes things really cheap when it comes to disk usage.

The idea of COW filesystems along with a couple GitHub issues, some tweets exchanged with @rcarmo and this post on improvements made on lxc-clone was enough to trigger my interest on BTRFS and I went out to learn more about it.

Ventriloquist demo

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I stumbled across this benchmark by Brandon Liu on StackMachine’s blog comparing the numbers for performing some typical tasks on his physical machine and doing the same thing using virtual machines.

The measurements were made using Discourse and compared the numbers of doing things on VirtualBox and VMware Fusion so I got curious to see how well vagrant-lxc shared folders would perform. What I ended up finding is that it seems that Discourse provides a base box that was configured by hand and the Chef cookbooks used only deal with some basic stuff and I’d have to either do things by hand or write some provisioning scripts on my own.

Sharing Chef Cookbooks

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to publish my Dokku Cookbook to Opscode Community since I open sourced it a couple weeks ago but didn’t have much success until last night. The initial configuration was not so straightforward to me so I thought I’d write it down in case I need to do it again. The information on this post is probably documented somewhere but I failed to find it, feel free to comment with links to official docs or other blog posts related :)

Announcing Ventriloquist

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Although I’ve been writing about and working on a lot of Vagrant related stuff lately, I need to say that I’m not a “DevOps guy”. My day to day job still consists of building web apps using Ruby On Rails and even though I like using Puppet (and recently Chef), my daily work does not involve any sort of machine configuration management.

Configuring a Vagrant development environment is not an easy task. As an example, the “default stack” of the Rails apps I’ve been working on consists on quite a few components and getting the provisioning scripts / manifests / recipes right is not a trivial task for many people (myself included). I know there are a lot of modules / cookbooks available out there but in my opinion having to know that they exist and learning how to wire them up together shouldn’t be a requirement for developers.

vagrant-lxc 0.5.0 and beyond

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I was able to release vagrant-lxc 0.5.0 and on this post you’ll get to know about some cool new stuff and the upcoming work I have in mind to reach what I believe would be a nice 1.0.0 milestone.

0.5.0 goodies

This release it mostly related to the “user experience” of using the plugin. Apart from some highlights you’ll get to know below, there are a few small things that makes people’s lives a bit easier:

Vundler is now Bindler!

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Quick update about Vundler: lots of people got confused about the plugin name because of Vim’s Vundle so we decided to rename it to Bindler. The name was originally proposed by Patrick Connolly and after seeing the pictures he pointed out (just forget about the first row ;) I thought that it’d fit nicely with a vagrant :)

Please note that you’ll need to uninstall and revert Vundler’s installation before upgrading to Bindler. Vundler wasn’t even 0.1.0 and is still highly experimental so I decided not to worry about keeping it backwards compatible.

Crafting your own vagrant-lxc base box

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As I said before, “next generation” vagrant-lxc boxes should simplify the process of “promoting” existing containers to base boxes. To back that up I’ve wrote a detailed step-by-step for creating an Ubuntu Precise and Debian Squeeze base boxes from an Ubuntu Host and I’m pretty sure it is possible to reuse the ideas from this post to build base boxes for / from other distros that suits everyone’s needs.

I’ve followed the steps on an Ubuntu 12.10 VirtualBox VM and if you want to follow along you might want to grab yourself a copy of the same Vagrantfile I used and fire it up with vagrant up --provider=virtualbox. I’m also assuming that you’ll follow each step within the same shell session as we’ll be reusing some variables between steps.

Vundler: Dead easy plugin management for Vagrant

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE (23 JUL 2013): Vundler has been renamed to Bindler!

Vagrant’s plugin “ecossystem” just keep growing and recently there has been a lot of interest on having an easy way for managing project’s specific plugin dependencies to avoid Dependency Hell and / or to reduce the amount of steps someone has to take when joining an ongoing project. There are at least 4 issues on Vagrant’s issue tracker (#1874, #1789, #1700 and #1574) and one initiative by @tknerr to solve the problem.

Improving vagrant-lxc boxes

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve played with Docker once again and have been looking around its codebase to find out how things work over there. Even though I’ve never wrote a single line of Go, it gave me some interesting insights about LXC itself and about packing up containers which influenced heavily the “next generation” vagrant-lxc base boxes and the upcoming work I have in mind for the provider.

Starting with V3 boxes, vagrant-lxc will introduce a better approach for building base boxes and will also simplify the process of “promoting” existing containers to base vagrant boxes. While it won’t introduce breaking changes, V3 boxes should be pushing more work into the base box preparation allowing us to eventually have “generic” creation scripts + lxc configs built into vagrant-lxc itself.

Stop wasting bandwidth with vagrant-cachier

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you have done any kind of Puppet manifests / Chef cookbooks development using Vagrant chances are that you’ve been staring at your screen waiting for the machine to be provisioned for really long periods of time, specially when you need to destroy the VM and start over.

A while ago I came across this gist which solves part of the issue by caching downloaded packages on the host machine and sharing them among similar VM instances. After copying and pasting it on different projects, I decided to extract it to a Vagrant plugin and expand its usage by supporting multiple Linux distros and package managers allowing others to benefit from it as well.

LXC provider for Vagrant

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: This post is likely to be out of date, please see this post for more

It’s been nearly 2 months since I open sourced my “not so pretty” initial spike and announced on Vagrant’s mailing list that I was going to work on this. By that time, Vagrant 1.1 wasn’t even released yet and it was a long way to get where it is now.

Almost two weeks after “releasing” the spike, Vagrant 1.1 came out and by then someone challenged people to write a LXC provider for it. I felt great since I was already using vagrant-lxc over the past couple weeks :)

Announcing letter_opener_web 1.0

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things I missed the most after going 100% on Vagrant was the ability to preview Rails apps sent mails on my browser. I got used to the awesome letter_opener gem which depends on launchy to fire up a new browser window with the email preview instead of sending. As launchy on its own wouldn’t be able to open up a browser window on the host machine from the guest box, I started to look around for alternatives and wasn’t able to find something else that worked for me.

100% on Vagrant

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I heard a lot about Vagrant and even though I had the chance to play with it, performance was always an issue that prevented me from doing 100% of my development work from a VM. By december, when my laptop started acting weird (and eventually died) I decided that my next computer would have as much cores and RAM that I could afford. I looked at a few different options and ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 15R SE with a Core I7 that has 4 cores and 8 threads and 8 Gb RAM. Combined with some Vagrant / VirtualBox tweaks, I’m now able to use Vagrant for pretty much all of my “real” (paid) development work.

Hello world!

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here we go again, this is another attempt to talk about my experiences on being a software developer and whatever else might cross my mind. Here I will speak either English or Portuguese which is my native language.