About Ruby Mad Science
Ruby Mad Science is a Ruby and Rails engineering publication focused on the practical side of building, deploying and maintaining production applications. The site covers deployment workflows, framework internals, debugging patterns, performance work and structured learning paths.
What you will find here
The content is organised into several distinct sections, each serving a different purpose:
- Topics — Deep reference pages on core areas like Rails deployment, internals, Ruby performance and debugging. Each topic works as a pillar page connecting related guides, posts and learning paths.
- Learning Paths — Ordered sequences of steps designed for structured progression. Each path takes you from a starting point to a clear outcome, with prerequisites, time estimates and common blockers documented along the way.
- Guides — Focused walkthroughs covering one task or comparison at a time. Deployment procedures, upgrade checklists, Nginx configuration, database indexing and production debugging patterns.
- Posts — Longer-form articles, year-in-review analyses, deployment war stories and observations that do not fit the guide format.
- Experiments — Lab-style entries: performance benchmarks, failure mode catalogues, architecture trade-off notes and deployment observations. Shorter and more exploratory than guides.
- Resources — Glossary, checklists and tooling recommendations. Reference material designed to be used alongside the guides and paths.
Editorial approach
Everything on this site is written from the perspective of working engineers who have spent years shipping, debugging and maintaining Rails applications at various scales. The writing prioritises practical specificity over theoretical completeness. When a guide says something breaks, it means we have seen it break.
The site uses a "topics made of ordered steps" approach to courseware-style content. Rather than isolated tutorials, the learning paths are designed so each step builds on the previous one. The goal is genuine competence, not surface-level awareness.
What this is not
This is not a glossy SaaS marketing site. There are no enterprise testimonials, no partnership badges and no claims of being trusted by thousands. It is an engineering publication maintained by people who care about Ruby, Rails and the craft of building software that works in production.
The changelog tracks editorial and structural updates to the site over time.
Contact
Questions, corrections or suggestions are welcome. See the contact page for details.