The past few days have been a blur, but in the best possible way.
I've been totally immersed in Ruby on Rails. From the missionary platform to our nonprofit’s new website (Gospel Impact Solutions), and making serious progress on the Check-in Butter app, Rails has been an absolute joy to build with. Each app is coming together faster and cleaner than before, and they just feel right.
One big goal I had was learning Kamal (37signals’ deployment tool) for Rails apps. And rather than just mess around with a toy project, I decided to go for something meaningful: rebuilding the website and CMS for Hope for the Forgotten Outreach. This is a Laravel site I had originally built earlier this year, but with the switch to Rails, I wanted to create something even more beautiful, more professional, and more tailored for their mission. You can see the sites here: Current site | New Site
I really care about what they do, and I want their online presence to reflect that same level of care and excellence.
Setting up Kamal was way smoother than I expected. I spun up a new droplet on DigitalOcean, followed the official docs, watched some tutorials, and figured out how to store secrets securely with 1Password. After a couple hours of experimenting and troubleshooting, it just worked. Once it deployed, I took the time to harden the server, and everything started to feel real.
What surprised me most? I genuinely enjoyed the whole process.
Even though I’ve been doing web dev for 30 years, I’m still new to Rails. At first, there was definitely some friction with Laravel habits that had to be re-mapped. But something clicked during this round of development. Rails started making sense. I stopped trying to force it to act like Laravel, and started letting it show me its own rhythm. It was fun.
And while I’ve been doing all this, I’ve been sick with what I call the “Michigan crud.” But instead of lying around, I decided to keep learning and building. It’s kept me focused and even lifted my spirits.
One more thing worth mentioning: I took a little time to explore the Freedom Stack, a clever Astro-based stack with great DX. I think there's a lot of potential there, and I’m excited to dig into it more in a future article.
For now, I’m just grateful. Rails has brought new energy into my development workflow, and I’ve gotten to connect with some awesome devs along the way. The Rails community is seriously one of the kindest I’ve ever experienced. I appreciate every tip, reply, and bit of insight shared with me.
This has been a week of learning, shipping, and the joy of building.
And I’m just getting started.