DEV Community: Avery Rivera

Rails 8: what I actually use from it

Avery Rivera — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:37:11 +0000

I've been on Rails 8 for a few months on a side project. Here's what I actually use day to day, versus what I expected to use.

Used constantly:

Solid Queue for background jobs
Solid Cache (one less service to run)
bin/setup style scripts

Barely used:

Kamal (great, but I deploy to one box)
Propshaft (nice, still learning the edges)

My take: the "no extra services" direction is the real win. A side project that runs on one box with a database and a queue in the same database is exactly what I want at 2am.

I'm still slowly reading SQLite internals. The more I learn about storage, the more I appreciate how much Rails hides.

SQLite is the side-project database I keep coming back to

Avery Rivera — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:42:39 +0000

Every side project I start, I ask myself if I need Postgres. The answer is almost always no.

SQLite gives me:

A single file I can back up by copying
Zero ops
More than enough performance for a side project

The caveat is concurrency. Once you have background jobs writing at the same time as requests, you need to think about WAL mode and busy timeouts. That's a 20-minute fix, not a reason to run a database server.

My current side project is Rails + SQLite, and the whole thing deploys as one container with a mounted volume.

I'm slowly reading about SQLite internals — the page format is a lot more approachable than I expected.