Any under-employed Rails developers want to help me make a keyboard website?

So, I run a website where I sell fancy keyboard stuff. This website runs on Shopify. Shopify is abysmally awful and an embarrassment to the human race. I therefore wish to make my own custom replacement, in hopes of making the process more pleasant for my clients and daily administrative headaches less painful for me.

I used to run a Ruby on Rails consulting firm and was involved in that technology from its earliest days, so theoretically I should be able to code my own solution. However, I (happily!) now spend most of my time getting fancy keyboards into the hands of eager enthusiasts, so I don’t really have time to code the whole thing myself. Nor does selling keyboards generate enough money for me (yet?) to be able to afford to hire a fancy firm to make one for me for some insane six-figure sum.

So I’ve been wondering if there might be any folks here in the keyboard community with Rails skills who would be interested in some contract work (paid, of course) helping me develop a custom Ruby on Rails e-commerce backend. I’ve been exploring working with various freelancers around the world, but it would be so much nicer (and more fun) to work with someone who actually knows and cares about keyboards. :blush:

If you know someone (or are someone!) who might be interested, please let me know!

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Happy to help with front-end design and dev if you need it. I’m not a rails/backend guy but I’m big on usability and visual design and happy doing plain HTML/CSS/JS development. PM me if you think these are skills you could use.

Much appreciated, but the front end side of things is actually already covered by another fellow KeebTalker who has been working with me for a few weeks on the mockups and CSS/HTML. I envy you guys those skills; I’ve never had the patience or proper mindset for JS. :blush:

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That’s no small order. Not a rails expert, but I can probably cobble something JS based together. Depends on your tech requirements and desired features. Mind if I DM for more info?

Many thanks, but I actually happen to be married to an accomplished JS developer who offered to code it for me, but ultimately I decided that I pretty strongly prefer to build it in a language and platform with which I’m familiar so I can tinker with and modify things as we go. Since I’ll ultimately be responsible to hotfixes and maintaining the deployment infrastructure, I think it’s best to stick with something in Ruby. I’d be up for eventually learning JS better and looked at options like Nextjs, but realized that I currently just don’t have the time, so my best option is to leverage the experience I already have rattling around in my head. :slight_smile:

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Makes sense. Seems like a logical choice. All the best!

If you want to roll something out with Nextjs and Vercel I can be a resource. Nextjs isn’t a big learning curve if you are familiar with React.

Alas, I’m not one of the cool kids like you guys. Nextjs and Vercel seem really cool in theory and clearly the next big thing, but I’m not at all familiar with React or even the rudiments of JS syntax. Knowledge of the alert() function is about the extent of my JS prowess.

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Im not cool either, but there is still hope for my HHKB :wink:

Let’s you and me start a new JS based e-commerce platform together. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I’m happy to help. I’ve been developing software for quite some time and did Ruby + rails for a few years. I haven’t touched it in a bit, but it’s like riding a bicycle!

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I’d absolutely love to help. I’ve been building websites for some time now and have been working with Ruby + rails for a couple of years.

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Happy to help if I can be of service. Been lurking for quite sometime here and created an account to post here. I’ve been programming for years, mainly ruby on rails apps and iOS apps. Kinda new to keyboard world, still waiting for my first keyboard kit GB to ship :laughing:. Let me know if you need more details.

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Hi, some friends pointed me here, I have 4 years of professional experience with rails and before this I had worked a little on a custom PHP e-commerce, can I ask you why you don’t like Shopify (just curious to understand a little better the problem)?

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would love to help with any CICD or backend infrastructure needs.

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Thanks so much everyone! I’ll PM those who posted above. :slight_smile:

Well, it’s 2.5 years later and my new app/site is nearly done.

Sadly, I never ended up finding any fellow keyboard enthusiast to work on the project and mostly ended up working with freelancers and doing the work myself. The freelancers are no longer available and I’m about to make a new push to things ready for launch, hopefully by summer or so. So I thought I’d check back again to see if any new/interested folks with Rails experience might have signed up on KeebTalk in the meantime (or would be seeing this thread for the first time).

I’d love to work on a fellow keyboard nerd on this project.

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