Guides — Ruby Mad Science

Guides

Each guide covers one clear task or comparison. Practical steps, explicit trade-offs, common mistakes and a checklist summary you can use on the job.

Technical reference cards and step-by-step procedure sheets
Guide · Deployment · 12 min

Deploy Ruby on Rails on a VPS

Complete deployment walkthrough: server preparation, Ruby versioning, Nginx reverse proxy, PostgreSQL, Puma and background jobs.

Guide · Language · 8 min

Ruby vs Rails

What Ruby gives you versus what Rails adds. When the framework helps, when it hinders, and how the two actually relate.

Guide · Upgrading · 9 min

Rails 8 Upgrade Checklist

What to audit, test and fix before upgrading. Deprecation triage, gem compatibility, test matrix and rollback planning.

Guide · Upgrading · 8 min

Ruby 4 Upgrade Notes

Key language changes, compatibility boundaries, and a practical approach to preparing your codebase for the next major Ruby version.

Guide · Infrastructure · 10 min

Nginx for Rails Apps

Reverse proxy setup, SSL termination, gzip compression, static asset serving and the Nginx directives Rails developers actually need.

Guide · Database · 11 min

PostgreSQL Indexing for Rails

Which indexes matter, how to read EXPLAIN, partial indexes, composite keys and the queries that slow down first.

Guide · Performance · 10 min

Web Performance for Rails Developers

Rendering waterfalls, asset budgets, caching layers, database query optimisation and front-end performance from a Rails perspective.

Guide · Debugging · 9 min

Debugging Production Rails Issues

Triage workflows, structured log analysis, memory leak detection, error tracking and the patterns that make production incidents shorter.

Guide · Background Jobs · 10 min

Sidekiq Background Jobs Patterns

Queue design, retry behaviour, idempotency, job prioritisation and the Sidekiq patterns that hold up under real production load.