About
Self-taught. Solo. Shipping.
I'm Joel Gaff, Jr., a self-taught Ruby on Rails developer in Portland, Oregon, USA. For the past four-plus years I've designed, built, and operated nearly a dozen production Rails apps. Solo. Every migration, every DNS record, every deploy.
I borrow a lot from the 37signals playbook: fixed time and variable scope, one boring monolith instead of a bunch of services, Hotwire instead of a heavy front end. I use SQLite whenever I can, and I write about what I'm working on.
How I work
Small scope, real deadlines
Cut the feature, not the quality. I ship small wins, frequently.
Boring stack, on purpose
Rails, SQLite, Hotwire, one server. Fewer moving parts means more shipping.
Written down
I try to share what I'm working on and how I work. You can audit how I think before you ever email me.
Currently shipping podiumstats.com and cucamonga.app, and looking for the next thing to build.