Where Ruby engineers come to think clearly about hard problems
Deployment, internals, debugging and performance. Structured paths, practical guides and experiment notes from years of shipping, breaking and fixing Rails applications in production.
Core Topics
All topics →Rails Deployment
Server setup, process management, reverse proxying, secrets handling and the real failure modes that hit small production stacks first.
Rails Internals
How the request cycle actually works, middleware ordering, autoloading, the asset pipeline and the parts of Rails that most tutorials skip.
Ruby Performance
Memory allocation, GC tuning, object shape optimisation, YJIT effects and how to measure what actually matters in production.
Debugging & Maintenance
Production triage, log analysis, dependency audits, safe refactoring patterns and making inherited Rails codebases less frightening.
Learning Paths
All paths →Each path is a sequence of topics and steps designed to build real competence, not just awareness. Work through them in order, or jump to the step that matches where you are right now.
Deploy Rails on Your Own Server
From blank VPS to production traffic. Ruby versioning, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Puma, background jobs, SSL, monitoring and the things that break first.
Understand Rails Internals
How a request becomes a response, what Rack does, how autoloading works, and why understanding the framework makes debugging ten times faster.
Make an Old Rails App Safer to Change
Dependency audits, test coverage gaps, safe upgrade strategies, dead code removal and building confidence in a codebase you inherited.
Latest Guides
All guides →Deploy Ruby on Rails on a VPS
Step-by-step deployment covering server prep, Ruby versioning, Nginx reverse proxy, PostgreSQL, Puma and background jobs.
Rails 8 Upgrade Checklist
What to audit, test and fix before upgrading a production Rails app. Deprecation triage, gem compatibility and rollback planning.
Nginx for Rails Apps
Reverse proxy configuration, SSL termination, gzip, static asset serving and the Nginx directives Rails developers actually need.
PostgreSQL Indexing for Rails
Which indexes matter, how to read EXPLAIN output, partial indexes, composite keys and the queries that slow down first as tables grow.
Posts
All posts →Twenty Small Reasons That Deploying a Rails App Is Hard
Deployment is not one big problem. It is twenty small ones, each capable of wasting a weekend. Here is the real list.
2014 Year in Review
Looking back at a year of Ruby engineering, side projects, conference work and the business of writing about software.
Experiment Notes
All experiments →Performance Notes
Observations from benchmarking Ruby versions, GC settings, YJIT effects and memory behaviour under production-like load.
Deployment Failure Modes
A running catalogue of deployment failures, root causes and mitigation patterns collected from real production incidents.