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. I manage every migration, the DNS records, and deploys.
I borrow a lot from 37signals: a single, maintainable, Rails monolith, Hotwire for the front end, and almost always SQLite. I like to write about what I'm working on, too.
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 omarchyguild.com, podiumstats.com, and cucamonga.app, and looking for the next thing to build.