All Aboard: My First Journey on Rails
After watching the Rails 8 demo video , I found myself intrigued by the idea of a truly “batteries included” framework. I’ve spent years working with JavaScript and recently also expanded to Golang. Where in both cases I tend to piece together my own stack from various tools. It was time for experimenting. Maybe it was the appeal of trying something that just works out of the box, or maybe it was simply the right time for a new adventure. Either way, I decided to dive in and see what the Rails world had to offer.
A New Language, A Smooth Transition
Despite being new to Ruby, I found the language surprisingly welcoming. Its syntax felt natural, and after just a few hours on try.ruby-lang.org and setting up a new Rails project I was navigating it with ease. Initially, all those files and folders felt overwhelming—especially since I’m used to starting from scratch—but Rails comes fully loaded. Even so, the code and structure were easy to understand, despite my limited experience.
Building Giftko In a Few Days
I needed a simple yet practical project, so I built Giftko —a straightforward gift wishlist app. The idea was basic: create and share wishlists. Over a few days, Giftko was up and running. In that time, I set up my routes, wrote a small web scraper for adding gifts, integrated the new Rails 8 authentication generator, set up transactional emails with SES and took full advantage of Rails’ command-line generators to quickly scaffold features. It all came together rather quickly.
Effortless Deployment
One of the delightful surprises of this journey was how easy the deployment process was. I host my personal projects on a Hetzner server, managing them with Coolify. Spinning up Giftko was painless—added a few ENV variables and created a persistent storage for SQLite then I simply pushed my code, watched it build, and a few moments later, my app was live.
What’s Next?
After shipping Giftko, I’m excited about exploring more of what Rails has to offer. I’ve discovered a toolset that encourages experimentation and quick iteration—a perfect playground for personal projects and learning. Whether I build another simple site or a more complex app, I know that Rails will support me rather than slow me down.
In the end, it’s not about changing my entire tech stack or abandoning what I know. It’s about adding another tool to my kit, expanding my horizons, and just enjoying the process of learning new things.
If you have any questions or just want to share your own experiences with Rails, feel free to drop me a message on Twitter .