Software Development, Test Automation, and DevOps for Fast-Growing Companies on Dennis Martinez | Helping Tech Teams Ship Rails Code Confidently

There’s a good chance your organization is running code in your production environment right now that nobody on your engineering team wrote.

Deploying your applications using platforms such as Heroku can help you get moving quickly at the start.

For years, Heroku has been one of the best ways to deploy your web applications.

Kamal is a great tool for deploying web applications to the server of your preference, and it’s an excellent choice to ship web projects, especially side projects.

Throughout this series of articles, we’ve gone through the entire process of setting up a review application workflow for web apps using Kamal, from setting up our cloud infrastructure to getting our application fully deployed and ready for testing.

Things are shaping up nicely as we roll along in this series on using Kamal to spin up review applications when opening new pull requests.

Throughout this series, we’ve set up an automated system to create temporary environments and deploy web applications for review purposes, similar to Heroku’s review apps functionality.

In this series, we’re going through the process of recreating a workflow similar to Heroku’s review apps for web applications using Kamal for deployments.

In my previous article, I began setting up a web application that uses Kamal for deployments to create a review app.

I’m a huge fan of Kamal for deploying my web applications.

One of the downsides of using Kamal for deploying your web applications, compared to using a platform as a service like Heroku, is that you’re now fully responsible for the safety of your application’s data.

37signals, the team behind Kamal, released Kamal v2.0 during the 2024 Rails World conference in September 2024.

Deprecated This article covers generating SSL certificates when using Kamal 1.x.

Checking the performance and resiliency of your web applications is not an optional step in the software development process these days.

Kamal makes deploying web applications to your preferred infrastructure a breeze.

In my previous article, Get Started With Hetzner Cloud and Terraform for Easy Deployments, I showed how simple it is to use Terraform to manage a firewall, private network, and server on Hetzner Cloud for deploying web applications.

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“Hey Dennis, I saw your pull request to add static code analysis to our app.

Last week, I began writing about some of the lessons I’ve learned since I began working in tech back in 2004.

On January 26, 2004, I started my first job in tech.

“Testers are slowing us down.

The pace and expectations in software development have drastically escalated in recent times.

Throughout my career, I’ve noticed something among teams that struggle to deliver consistent results: a lack of clear documentation.

When building infrastructure for your applications, it’s hard to beat a tool like Terraform.

Deprecated This article covers Kamal 1.x, which is now deprecated.

Many organizations think hiring a freelancer, whether a software developer, a tester, or a DevOps engineer, is only about producing a tangible outcome.

As someone who’s been working with Ruby on Rails applications for 15 years and counting, it’s been amazing to see how it remains relevant in web development today.

When a tech-based organization begins to grow successfully, it’ll eventually find itself looking at ways to scale and improve its existing processes.

A client I worked with recently had an automated system that generated a proprietary file within AWS and stored it in a private Amazon S3 bucket.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s largest cloud service platform, widely adopted in organizations of all shapes and sizes across the web.

One of my favorite tools I use nearly daily is Docker.

In the first part of this series, we introduced the concept of using Hugo to build a static website and automating updates to an Amazon S3 bucket using GitHub Actions.

In a recent article, I wrote about how to set up an Amazon S3 bucket to host a static website using Terraform.

Nothing is more ubiquitous in the world of cloud computing services than Amazon S3.