Jeff Dickey on Mise, Precompiled Rubies, and much more

Jeff Dickey on Mise, Precompiled Rubies, and much more

From Remote Ruby by Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, David Hill

March 6, 2026 · 1h 17m · Episode 341

About this episode

The episode features Jeff Dickey discussing his work on mise and the challenges of Ruby distribution.

Chris, Andrew, and David welcome special guest Jeff Dickey (jdx), creator of mise, discussing his background rewriting the Heroku CLI from Ruby to Node due to Ruby distribution/sandboxing issues. The conversation digs into why language CLIs are hard to distribute, the tradeoffs between shims vs PATH-based version switching, why tasks can be the “clean” solution, and Jeff’s Rust-first tooling philosophy. They also dive into his other projects: usage (CLI docs/completions), Pitchfork (dev...

People in this episode

Hosts: Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, David Hill

Guest: Jeff Dickey

Topics covered

  • Ruby distribution
  • CLI tools
  • programming languages
  • version switching
  • Rust tooling
  • Heroku CLI

Keywords

  • Ruby
  • CLI
  • Heroku
  • Node
  • Rust
  • version switching
  • shims
  • tools

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Heroku, Node, Rust

Products: mise, usage, Pitchfork

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