A full week of building Rails Startup

This week, I deliberately cleared my schedule of all client work so I could focus entirely on Rails Startup. It is the application I'm building (and already using) as a foundation for a few of my own side projects. Aside from the occasional dad duty, I managed to spend quite some hours deep in the code.

I focused on two bigger pieces of functionality:
✅ Account-based access with multiple users and roles
✅ Full subscription management, from plan selection to billing details

During the process, I rediscovered Rails fixtures.

I haven’t used them in a while, but they really clicked this week. Once you understand how to use them properly, it’s incredibly easy to set up real-world scenarios. No complex traits or callback chains like I was used to with FactoryBot. Just clear, expressive YAML files that describe exactly what’s going on.

And the best part? They’re fast as lightning! ⚡️

There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to get the application in shape for release. Once that’s done, I’ll be adding more features. For now, it just felt great to spend a full week working on my own project.