Kubernetes is the industry-standard way to run containers — and a large operational commitment. An honest look at what it gives you, what it costs, and whether a small team building a Rails app actually needs it (usually: not yet).
A CI pipeline is only useful if you trust it — and a flaky one is worse than none, because it trains the team to ignore red. A guide to building pipelines that are fast, deterministic, and trustworthy, all the way to deploy.
Docker has matured from a curiosity into the default way to get a consistent environment. A guide to Dockerising a Rails app for development and CI — docker-compose for the full stack, the layer-cache discipline, and where Docker helps versus where it adds friction.
You cannot fix what you cannot see. A guide to monitoring a Rails app in production — the handful of metrics that actually matter, error tracking, structured logs, and alerting on symptoms your users feel rather than noise.
On a busy store, a careless migration takes the site down by locking a table. A guide to safe schema changes — the locks that bite, adding columns and indexes safely, and the expand-contract pattern for renames and NOT NULL.
Long-lived feature branches cause painful merges and big-bang releases. Feature flags let you merge to trunk continuously and decouple deploy from release. A guide to the workflow, the kinds of flags, and managing flag debt.
Capistrano automates deployment over SSH with atomic releases and one-command rollbacks. A practical guide to the releases/current model, shared files, the Rails task chain, multistage config, and the gotchas worth knowing.
A war story about standing up the infrastructure behind a cryptocurrency project — coin daemons, wallets, and key handling — reproducibly, with shell scripts and Ansible. The security lessons that only a money-handling system teaches.
A war story about packaging bitcoind in a container: the initial block download that humbles you, why the blockchain must live in a volume, locking down the RPC interface, and what a full node teaches you about long-running stateful services.
Ansible configures servers over plain SSH with no agent to install. A practical guide to provisioning a Ruby app server with idempotent playbooks and reusable roles — and why agentless won us over.
Clicking through the AWS console does not scale past a handful of servers. How we drive an EC2 fleet from Ruby — declaring instances as data, reconciling desired against actual, and tagging your way to sanity.
Docker is approaching 1.0 and it is about to change how we ship Ruby apps. A hands-on guide to images, containers, and Dockerfiles — building a reproducible dev environment and why 'works on my machine' is finally on its way out.