Matt Brictson

Having used Capistrano almost daily for most of my Rails career, I was keenly aware that its console output left a lot to be desired, which made troubleshooting harder and made Capistrano intimidating to new users. This led me to create "Airbrussh", a gem that plugs into Capistrano to overhaul the "visual design" of its log system. I also wrote an article about how my approach borrowed concepts from UI and UX disciplines (linked in the project README).

I maintain a rails-template project on GitHub where I’ve compiled many of the Rails techniques I’ve learned. I use this to generate Rails apps for new client projects and to build prototypes of new features for existing apps. The template creates a highly optimized development environment that also contains best practices for security, testing, deployment, code quality, and continuous integration.

Most of my Rails projects over the years are deployed to servers running Ubuntu, where I have been responsible for provisioning and configuring the various system services. This includes setting up firewalls, NGINX, SSL/TLS, PostgreSQL, logrotate, and may other pieces necessary for hosting a modern Rails stack. The Capistrano-MB project is my comprehensive set of Capistrano recipes that automate this entire process. This allows me to deploy a Rails app to a brand new Ubuntu VPS in a matter of minutes.

A code extracted from one of my open source projects, Chandler. The code I've extracted is the Chandler:Git class and some other supporting code. Its purpose is to use the Git shell command to extract information from a Git repository, specifically the origin remote and tags conforming to a standard version format.

Unit tests are included in this file, along with Minitest's autorun feature, so the user only needs to run the file with Ruby 2.1 or newer, and the unit tests will execute and pass.