An account of rebuilding this blog in Ruby on Rails after three years away from writing. Covers the decision to move from WordPress and PHP, going static to remove the database entirely, consolidating several hosting services into one with automated deployments, adopting ViewComponent and Lookbook to build a design system, and adding comprehensive automated testing with RSpec and GitHub Actions.

Practical advice on switching programming languages mid-career, drawn from ten years of PHP and a move into Ruby. Covers approaching the job hunt honestly, how core engineering principles translate across languages — comparing PHP interfaces with Ruby duck typing — making the most of code reviews as a learning tool, and why comments matter more than ever when you're new to a codebase.

A walkthrough of a Webpack boilerplate theme for WordPress, covering Hot Module Replacement for live browser updates without a full reload, Sass compilation and autoprefixing, ES6 transpilation via Babel, cache-busting manifest files, automatic favicon generation, and CSS and JavaScript minification — with separate development and production configurations throughout.