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Ask yourself one question: if an AI agent had direct access to your database and your APIs right now — would it still need your product? I’ve been building SaaS for 20 years. When I ask myself that honestly, the answer about most of what I’ve built is: no. Not really. That’s not a technology…

In this short, I reflect on Ryan R. Hughes’ article, “14 Minutes → 4 Seconds: A Tale of Switching from RSpec to Minitest.” After already optimizing their RSpec test suite down to 14 minutes, his team gradually migrated to Minitest and fixtures — removed FactoryBot — and ended up at 4 seconds. Same tests. Larger…

At small scale, Rails database changes feel routine. At larger scale, they can quietly become a source of risk. This short video explains why “normal” migrations stop being safe as your SaaS grows — and how hidden assumptions in production can come back to bite later. This is the kind of risk RailsRescueAudit is designed…

In this video I walk you through Rails Rescue Audit — a simple tool that analyzes your Ruby on Rails app for risks, outdated gems, schema issues, bloated dependencies, and configuration problems. Upload a few key files, and get a clear, actionable report in seconds. 👉 Supports: * Gemfile.lock * schema.rb * config/database.yml * config/application.rb…

Running your Rails app on AWS OpenSearch? You might be burning cash for no reason. In this video, I show you how I migrated my production Rails app to a self-hosted Elasticsearch 7.10.2 instance on Hetzner — cutting costs by 80%, gaining control, and improving visibility. You’ll see: – The exact scripts I used (scroll…

🚀 DOWNLOAD the full deploy kit (FREE): https://realliferails.com/dockerized-deploy-kit/ Tired of broken CI pipelines, flaky SSH agent forwarding, or wasting hours configuring Capistrano on every new machine? This video shows you my Dockerized Capistrano deploy workflow — the exact method I use to deploy all my Ruby on Rails apps with zero downtime, no CI, and…

Escape the nightmare of vendor lock-in! In this video, I show you exactly how I migrated a 500GB production MySQL database away from DigitalOcean’s Managed Database service — without data loss, and without days of downtime. If you’re stuck on DigitalOcean and wondering how to move your MySQL database to your own server, this step-by-step…

** Courses and Merchandise ** Check out my Real Life Rails merchandise here: https://shop.realliferails.com Buy my course on creating a Rails app for Generative AI here: https://rails-assist.thinkific.com Buy other courses here: https://gumroad.philsmy.com Can you believe someone spent $100,000 building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? In this video, I break down the story of a tech…

** Courses and Merchandise ** Check out my Real Life Rails merchandise here: https://shop.realliferails.com Buy my course on creating a Rails app for Generative AI here: https://rails-assist.thinkific.com Buy other courses here: https://gumroad.philsmy.com Ready to take your Rails app to the next level? In this video, I’ll walk you through the entire process of upgrading your…