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
Top Words
- rails
- active
- storage
- internals
- understanding
- helper
- working
- freelancing
- developers
- redirects
- manual
- render
All posts (43)
After three years of freelancing and over a year of running my own software studio, here're some scattered thoughts on freelancing as a software developer, especially around web development.
If you’re an experienced web developer looking to go freelance, or just line up a few solid side gigs, there’s a simple shift that can make your life much easier: stop targeting upwork / individuals / mom-and-pop shops, and sell to businesses. Focus on clients who already know how to work with developers and have...
You can safely extract options hash from the end of an argument list using the extract_options! method in Rails. Not only it simplifies the method definition but it keeps the method's API flexible, allowing you to add new options without breaking existing callers.
In this post, we’ll explore how redirects work in Rails: what they are, how to redirect manually, and how the redirect_to method simplifies things. We’ll cover common use cases, security considerations, and even dig into the Rails source to see how redirect_to works under the hood.
This is the seventh post in the series on Rails controllers.Redirects are an important part of the web, and Rails gives us a clean and expressive way to use them with the redirect_to helper method.But what's actually going on when you call redirect_to?It's easy to treat it as a magical Rails incantation that just...
In this post, we'll learn how Rails' render method works and how to use it effectively. From rendering templates, partials, and inline content to JSON and custom status codes, this post explores the different ways to render views from your controllers.
This is the sixth post in the series on Rails controllers.When building Rails apps, we often take render for granted. It’s easy to let Rails implicitly render the default template or to drop in render :new to render a different template.However, as you get deeper into Rails, you learn that there’s a lot more under...
A staging environment is a safe replica of production where you can test features before going live. In this post, we'll create a staging environment for the blog and deploy to it with Kamal. It also covers the basics of Rails environments and shows how to configure Kamal for staging deployments.
In this post, I'll provision and configure the staging infrastructure for my blog, which is a Rails application. This includes installing and setting up a PostgreSQL database server, allowing connections only from the Rails application server, and locking it down by disabling direct public access.
Last week, I used AI to finally learn the basics of QuickBooks and handle my company’s bookkeeping. AI didn’t just help me finish a chore, it taught me a skill I’d been avoiding for years. When used with intent, the modern AI tools can accelerate your learning in surprising ways.
Vibe coding is overrated. Vibe learning, on the other hand, is so underrated.I’ve always wanted to learn the basics of bookkeeping so I could manage the finances for my company, or at least, stay on top of what's going on financially.I had tried a couple of times in the past, opened up QuickBooks, clicked around,...
Announcing a new newsletter where I write about topics beyond Ruby on Rails: running a software services business, freelancing, positioning and marketing for developers, working with AI, hiring and tech recruiting, etc. Business Logic is about everything that happens around writing software, well.
Page 3 of 4