I'm feeling pretty excited right now. I just deployed this website using Ruby on Rails and Kamal.
It's been a very long time since I built anything with Ruby on Rails. There was a trend online for a while that questioned the scalability of Rails after Twitter moved on to a different tech stack many years ago. While I've never really bought into the narrative that "Rails doesn't scale", it certainly had an impact on what tech companies decided to build with. Over the past decade or so, the industry seemed to be moving away from Rails in favor of micro-services and front end JavaScript frameworks like React.
I think what made me want to try Rails again was listening to David Heinemeier Hansson's tech talk in Toronto when he demoed Rails 8 for the first time. There's something about DHH's unique brand of slightly angry enthusiasm that always gets me pumped up, but this talk in particular really spoke to me on several levels.
There was a segment in that talk where he talked about developers becoming "
pink elephants, bound in learned helplessness by a single rope", afraid to deploy their applications to production themselves. Honestly I felt like in that moment he may as well have been speaking to me directly. For many years, I've had the privilege and luxury of working in a large software company that has an entire department of Site Reliability Engineers specifically dedicated to deploying our application code. I hadn't realized before listening to his talk, but I had become the pink elephant DHH was talking about; incapable of deploying to production without the helping hand of a CI pipeline built by someone else.
I don't want to be the elephant any more. I want to have the freedom to be able to publish any code I want, wherever I want to, and have the confidence that nothing will go wrong. That's why I'm so excited to publish this. My own site, on my own domain, with my own content.
Not only have I succeeded in publishing this blog to the open internet, I've taken this even a step further than that. As I'm writing this blog post, I'm typing on a Thinkpad I purchased a few weeks ago running Ubuntu Linux riced with DHH's new environment setup tool
Omakub. After using Mac OS as my primary operating system for over a decade, I've decided it's time to make the switch over to Linux. So far I'm really liking how things have been set up with Omakub, but who knows? Maybe I'll take things a step further and try out a different Linux distribution one of these days.
So thanks DHH for putting me on this path. I'll continue to tinker with this blog, so stay tuned for more content.