Writing on life, business, art & other random topics.

All of my long-form thoughts on tech, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.

Getting Started with Ruby on Rails and Kubernetes

Why should we deploy our Rails applications to Kubernetes? Traditionally we’ve deployed our applications to the cloud using services like Heroku or on virtual private servers on Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or Digital Ocean using a custom set of Ansible scripts to automate the process. This has worked well an still continues to work well, however we run into issues with scaling our servers to meet users demands and upgrading hardware and software isn’t always easy without downtime.

Deploying Ruby on Rails Apps on Kubernetes

In Part 1 in this series, we’ve setup our accounts, installed the required tools we need to deploy our Rails application to a Kubernetes cluster. We’ve even started working on our Rake file that we’re using to document our steps and interface with our cluster. In this post, we’ll expand our Rake file to deploy our application to the cluster. In this walkthrough, we’ll accomplish the following:

Scaling Ruby on Rails Apps with Kubernetes

In the second part of this series, we have a working Rails application up and running in our cluster with a load balancer to boot. In this post, we’re going to explore how to scale and manage our Rails application running in our cluster.

Quick Wins to Improve Rails Performance

We’ve all most likely received that dreaded message about our Rails application being “too slow” or even worse “the page won’t load”. In a lot of cases, these issues are difficult to track down because likely it works fine on your development machine or the production server is working perfectly now. So we’re faced with the challenge of tracking down seemingly random bottlenecks that happened in the middle of the night.

How to Make Action Text Work with Rails 5.2

When DHH announced Action Text, I really like the idea of making rich text editors easier to use especially when throwing photos in the mix. It’s come up multiple times in projects over the years and it’s never been easy to do. It just so happens, I was working on a project that needed a simple blog and would be perfect match for Action Text. Only problem was it was a Rails 5.2 application and Action Text is really slated for Rails 6, which won’t be released until next year. So I decided to see if I can make it work.

Seamlessly Navigate Rails Projects With Tmux

In last week’s Dayton Ruby meetup, Chris Chernesky spoke about how he uses Tmux for his everyday Rails development. It was great talk and ever since the meetup, Tmux has been all the buzz at the Littlelines office. I’ve been using Tmux for a few years and it has become an essential tool for my workflow. Tmux’s window and session management make it a no-brainer for those who live in the terminal.