The Writing
Articles on Ruby, Rails, and the engineering behind WhittakerTech's products.
Poly 1.3.0 lowers the supported ActiveRecord and ActiveSupport floor from 7.1 to 6.1. No library code changed: the old floor was a policy choice, not a technical constraint. Here is what moved, what did not, and how it is tested.
Midas 0.5.0 lowers its supported Rails floor from 7.1.5.2 to 6.1. Here is what changed in the Poly dependency, the version-conditional enums, the bundled migrations, and the CI matrix.
Rails avoids polymorphic joins by design—but real systems often have deterministic cases. Here’s how reflection, Arel, and explicit opt-in can make polymorphic joins safe, auditable, and production-ready without injecting SQL.
How 9 years of solo full-stack experience translated into 2.5x team velocity through systemic architectural prep. First sprint planning delivered production code in 4 days for VA's CaseFlow system.
How we rebuilt a legacy synchronous Paperclip + S3 image pipeline into a fully asynchronous architecture—cutting processing time from 11 hours to 2 minutes without scaling dynos or increasing infrastructure costs.
Complete Rails Docker configuration reference with all Dockerfiles, GitHub Actions, Makefiles, and troubleshooting guides. Ready-to-use templates for production deployment.
Complete guide to deploying Rails Docker containers on Heroku. Includes heroku.yml config, GitHub Actions CI/CD, monitoring setup, and performance optimization results.
Solve Rails Docker libv8-dev and Node.js 20 conflicts. Learn alternative approaches with sassc-rails, mini_racer, and libv8-node for stable builds.
Fix Rails Docker asset pipeline conflicts between Propshaft and Sprockets. Learn the package.json dependencies fix that solved our build failures and improved performance.
Learn how to structure Rails Docker builds with multi-stage architecture, base images, and development/production parity. Complete examples with PostgreSQL integration.
