# Things I Do To My Every Rails Code Base

DevFeed: [Things I Do To My Every Rails Code Base](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/things-i-do-to-my-every-rails-code-base-28272.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/rails/2020/09/18/things-i-do-to-my-every-rails-code-base.html>)

Author: Fuzzygroup

Published: 2020-09-18T11:20:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Scott Johnson](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/scott-johnson.md>)

Topics: [Rails](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rails.md>), [Documentation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/documentation.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [DevOps](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/devops.md>), [Markdown](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/markdown.md>), [Shell](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/shell.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/development.md>), [devops](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/devops.md>), [documentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/documentation.md>), [markdown](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/markdown.md>), [rails](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rails.md>), [shell](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/shell.md>), [sysadmin](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sysadmin.md>), [tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tooling.md>)

## AI overview

A personal developer article describes practices the author applies to Rails projects and, more broadly, to Python, PHP, and other languages. It emphasizes keeping project documentation in a local docs directory and using tools and automation to make development and operations easier.

## Source excerpt

NOTE: This is written in a Rails context but I've applied these techniques to Python and PHP as well as other languages. This isn't Rails specific as much as it is a development best practice. My very first rails codebase was a project called eduFire which was a C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplace for educators who wanted to sell online tutoring in language instruction. This let an instructor: build a profile advertise their services to people who wanted to learn conduct video tutoring sessions make a decent side income eduFire was a lightly funded startup (seed an then an A round) where all ops tasks were done by the engineers who built the product. And, yes, there were only two of us with about 90% of the ops tasks falling on my shoulders. From a technical perspective, we were doing DevOps although we certainly: didn't call it that didn't use today's generation of automated tooling much save shell scripting What that project did for me though was force me to figure out an approach to my Rails projects that centered around: Documentation Making things easy for myself eduFire was built and deployed from 2007 to 2009. Now this was a time when Rails applications where harder to deploy and keep running. And that instability was actually good for me. I went through a period in Summer of 2008 when I was constantly on call and my kids, now over a decade later, can tell the tale of my work Mac laptop intoning: "eduFire IS DOWN" loudly, in the voice of god at 3 am or some such ridiculous hour. What I learned from this was that you can fix anything from a dead sleep if you have: Documentation Tools Each of these is discussed below. Documentation The first thing I do with any rails app, right after the rails new command is this: mkdir docs And in that directory I place markdown files of any documentation that I might need. Here's an example of what's in the docs directory for the Covid Near Me app: ❯ ls -l docs total 80 -rw-r--r--@ 1 sjohnson staff 1192 Mar 24 07:29 api_jo