About
I am Viktor Schmidt, a Product Engineer based in Germany with over fifteen years of professional software development behind me. I build production systems, mostly in Ruby on Rails, and I write about what I learn along the way.
This blog exists because I got tired of searching for specific technical answers and finding repackaged documentation or shallow tutorials that stop right before the interesting part. The part where you hit an edge case. The part where the default configuration breaks under load. The part where two well-documented tools interact in an undocumented way. I wanted a place to write about those parts, so I built one.
What I write about
The topics here reflect what I work with daily: Ruby on Rails, Hotwire (Turbo and Stimulus), Kamal for deployment, and increasingly, AI-augmented development: using large language models not as toys but as real tools in a professional engineering workflow. I also write about engineering leadership, the kind that happens in code reviews, architecture decisions, and one-on-ones, not just in strategy decks.
Everything published here comes from practice. When I write about a deployment pattern, I have used it in production. A testing approach I share has been run against a real codebase. When I describe a tradeoff, I have lived with the consequences. I am not interested in theoretical comparisons or feature announcements. I am interested in what actually works, what breaks, and why.
Why specificity matters
The world has enough general advice. I would rather show you the exact configuration that solved a problem, the benchmark that justified a decision, or the code that replaced a workaround. If I mention a number, it is a real number. If I show a code block, it runs. Specificity is the difference between content that sounds helpful and content that actually is.
Working with me
I work as an independent Product Engineer. If you are looking for someone to help with Rails architecture, deployment infrastructure, AI-augmented development workflows, or engineering leadership consulting, I have a Services page with the details.
Connect
You can find me in a few places:
LinkedIn is the best way to reach me directly.