Matt Brictson is a software engineer living and working in San Francisco. This personal site is his excuse to practice design, CSS, and blog about programming topics.

Matt has been working 20+ years for Bay Area tech companies, boutique software consultancies, and his own own freelancing clients. Values that he has seen succeed in engineering organizations in all of these places are:

• a generalist, product-oriented mindset
• small but empowered cross-functional teams
• a preference to “ship the simplest thing that works”
• a relentless focus on prioritization and iteration

Those values, along with a desire to get more involved in open source, led him to discover Ruby on Rails in 2010. You’ll find many Rails-oriented best practices, deep dives, and tutorials on this blog that reflect his 12+ years experience with the framework and its ecosystem.

You can keep up with Matt by subscribing to the RSS feed for this site, or follow his activity on GitHub, where he manages a few popular open source Ruby projects and publishes several of his own.

Matt is also open to new freelancing and full-time opportunities; send a note to hello@mattbrictson.com or on LinkedIn if you’d like to start a conversation.

This site is lovingly over-engineered in a way only an indulgent side-project can be.

It is served by a small custom Rails app, proxied through NGINX for better performance. Blog posts are written in an extended version of Markdown and rendered as HTML using the redcarpet gem. Open source project data is fetched from GitHub via the GraphQL API.

The Rails app uses Semaphore for CI/CD, and is hosted on the smallest-tier droplet on DigitalOcean, using tomo for deployment automation. TLS certificates are provided by Let’s Encrypt.

The visual design was sketched on paper and in Figma, then realized as custom-written CSS. Text is rendered using a modern font stack that leverages the San Francisco variable font family on Apple operating systems. Icons are from Tabler Icons. The frontend is compiled through Vite and uses tiny amounts of Turbo and Stimulus for progressive enhancement, like highlight.js for highlighting code blocks.

A portion or all of the source code may be open-sourced at some point; in the meantime, feel free to email hello@mattbrictson.com if you have specific questions about the implementation or to report bugs.