Write Software, Well
Akshay
My name is Akshay, and I'm a software developer living in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. I grew up in India, but Canada has been my home for the past 10 years. I am married to Pratiksha and we have a daughter, Suhani. I love programming in Ruby and building web applications with Rails. This blog is my attempt to share my learnings and to spread the joy of programming in Ruby with the world. Every day, I try to learn something new in Ruby and Rails and write about it.
October 2026
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All posts (43)
For the past two years, I've been working with a client , an enterprise software company (built with Ruby on Rails, of course), particularly in the niche of software used by enterprises of all sizes + MSPs and IT administrators for real businesses like law firms, municipalities, architects, hospitals, manufacturers,...
Dropping a column from a database table is one of the simplest possible migrations, if you just look at the syntax. But if you run that migration in a large application used by a ton of users where taking the application down for maintenance is not an option, you may run into problems.One thing I didn't realize...
These are my notes from the first few chapters of Refactoring Databases by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage. The book was published in 2006 and its examples are a bit outdated, but the underlying ideas translate well to modern Rails applications where migrations serve as the primary mechanism for schema evolution. A...
Last year, I announced plans to rewrite this blog in Ruby on Rails. It was hosted on Ghost for all these years (which is built with Node.js), and the idea was to rebuild it from scratch in Rails and write about the process as I went along. I even published a few posts as I started development.However, as you may...
💡This post is part of a series on Active Storage internals. See also: Understanding the Active Storage Domain Model and How has_one_attached Works in Rails.Disclaimer: I used Claude Code to trace through the Rails codebase and explain how various parts of it are related to each other. Lately, I've found it an...
This post is part of a series on Active Storage internals. See also: Understanding the Active Storage Domain Model and Understanding has_one_attached.Disclaimer: I used Claude Code to trace through the Rails codebase and explain how various parts of it are related to each other. Lately, I've found it an excellent...
Two days ago, Rails added a new feature that makes working with bearer tokens easier. Before, you had to parse the Authorization header to extract them. Now, there's a dedicated bearer_token method on the request object that handles this for you.Add `ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token` to extract the bearer token...
Two days ago, Rails added a new feature that makes working with bearer tokens easier. Before, you had to parse the Authorization header to extract them. Now, there's a dedicated bearer_token method on the request object that handles this for you.Link to the PR: Add ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token to extract the...
While going through recently merged PRs in Rails, I came across a new feature from DHH, that handles a common concern in app configuration: managing credentials across different configuration backends in a single, consistent manner.Add Rails.app.creds to provide combined credentials lookup in ENV and encrypted file...
While going through recently merged PRs in Rails, I came across a new feature from DHH, that handles a common concern in app configuration: managing credentials across different configuration backends in a single, consistent manner. [Link to the PR]When you're going through the PR, I highly recommend you also read...
In this post, we'll explore the internals of has_one_attached method in Active Storage. It covers two interesting patterns, i.e. proxy and change objects. We'll trace the control flow from the model DSL to persistence and uploads, and explain how files are created, detached, and purged.
People usually read fiction before going to bed. I have a strange habit of reading the Rails source code at night. Not because it puts me to sleep, but for some reason I find the process of opening the Rails codebase, picking some feature, and just reading Ruby for an hour or two strangely calming. It lets me forget...
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