Live dashboards
KPI tiles that morph in place when underlying data changes — broadcast from the server, no polling.
Rails 8 · Hotwire · Turbo Streams
From idea to
working prototype
in one week.
We've been shipping Ruby on Rails since version 2 in 2008. Seventeen years, eight major releases, hundreds of production systems. Today we use Rails 8 with Hotwire to deliver real, clickable products in a week — not slideware, not a Figma flow.
2008
Since Rails 2
8
Major versions
100+
Apps shipped
The Rails timeline · we were there
-
2008
Rails 2
Our first invoicing platform. RESTful from day one.
-
2010
Rails 3
Asset pipeline. Bundler. We shipped six client SaaS.
-
2013
Rails 4
Strong parameters, Russian-doll caching.
-
2016
Rails 5
Action Cable. First real-time client dashboards.
-
2019
Rails 6
Action Mailbox, parallel testing.
-
2021
Rails 7
Hotwire arrives. We rebuild client SPAs as Turbo apps — half the JS, twice the speed.
-
2024
Rails 8 · today
Solid Queue, Solid Cache, native deploys with Kamal. Where we are today.
Why Rails 8
A monolith with superpowers.
Rails 8 made the boring infrastructure trivial. No more Redis. No more separate Sidekiq workers. No more a-half-dozen config services. Less stack to maintain, faster to ship, cheaper to host.
01 · Hotwire
SPA feel, no SPA weight.
Turbo Drive, Turbo Frames and Turbo Streams. The pages morph in place, real-time updates land via Action Cable, and your team writes ERB instead of fighting React state.
02 · Solid trifecta
Postgres for everything.
Solid Queue replaces Sidekiq. Solid Cache replaces Redis cache. Solid Cable replaces the Redis pub/sub. One database, one set of credentials, one backup story.
03 · Kamal 2
Deploy to any Linux box.
No Heroku tax. No Kubernetes complexity.
04 · Auth built in
No more Devise.
First-party authentication generator.
05 · Propshaft
Asset pipeline, simplified.
No Webpacker, no Sprockets quirks.
The 1-week prototype
Five days. Real software.
Not a clickable Figma. Not a "design system". A running Rails 8 app on a real URL, with auth, real database, real domain logic. You can show it to a customer or an investor on Friday afternoon.
-
1
Mon
Frame
Half-day workshop. We map the actual user journey, the data model, and what we will and won't ship this week.
-
2
Tue
Skeleton
Rails 8 scaffold up. Auth, layout, base routes, deploy pipeline to a real subdomain. Slack channel opened.
-
3
Wed
Core flow
The one user journey that matters end-to-end. Real persistence, no fake data.
-
4
Thu
Hotwire polish
Real-time updates via Turbo Streams. Forms, validations, edge cases. Looks like a product.
-
5
Fri
Show & learn
Live demo at 16:00. We capture next-week priorities together. The app stays online.
⚡
Why one week works
Rails' opinionated defaults remove decision fatigue. Hotwire removes the front-end build step. Kamal removes the deploy bottleneck. Pair that with senior engineers who've built this exact thing before, and "MVP in a week" stops being a slogan.
What real-time looks like
Turbo Streams in production.
Five concrete real-time patterns we ship every week with Rails 8 + Hotwire — no React, no separate WebSocket servers, no GraphQL subscription contracts.
Inline editing
Click a field, edit it, save, the row updates. Zero JS. One controller action.
Multi-user activity
Who's currently viewing what. Presence + cursors via Action Cable, persisted in Solid Cable.
Background job progress
Long-running imports report progress to the originating user via Turbo Streams broadcast.
Notifications
Toast notifications and bell badges that appear instantly when a colleague mentions you.
Search-as-you-type
Server-rendered search results stream into a Turbo Frame as the user types.