The Strays

I'm making progress, but I get tired!

August 12, 2026

I’m almost three months into my new job and when I started, I most certainly would not have described myself as a Rails dev. Now, I reluctantly describe myself as a Rail dev, haha. It’s on my perpetually growing list of technical stacks I’ve been tossed into and tried to keep standing upright. I imagine most engineers that make a long career out of this gig go through this transition countless times; you know enough code, enough software, enough tools for a place to hire you without having worked their particular stack day-to-day. Then you onboard, and learn.

Over the last couple months, I’ve definitely gotten faster at navigating our Rails codebases and orienting myself properly so I can start writing code or at least mapping out my changes. “Ah users can reuse the same product key even after it has been redeemed, let me open the React component holding the Key container and Redeem button. Then, let me see what controller we’re hitting and what services get started. Finally, what validations do we have in place?”

MVC setups are not unique to Rails, but even if the architecture is familiar and you can find the right files every piece that isn’t adds a little bit of extra brainpower that really compounds. Local dockerized environments you need to show some love, services that need to talk to each other, log messages you can’t parse immediately, migrations that don’t run for reasons you don’t understand yet, all wear you out. But solving them doesn’t result in an immediate PR being opened. Just a part of the process.

Moreover, I have a few hours out of my day where I can do deep work (on a good day); build a new mental model of our system, write fairly complex code by hand, debug a moderately complex bug. It can be tough and frustrating to figure out what to do with the rest of the time. I’ve definitely reached for the LLMs to squeeze out some productivity, but I think your returns diminish faster than you imagine. I still want to review the changes LLMs propose and understand any work they did to produce them. I haven’t gone full YOLO mode yet, and I’m not sure I will anytime soon.