Tbh I had no idea this was even a thing until recently. I've been working with Rails for a while now and somehow never came across it. So let me explain it the way I understood it. You know how we normally do associations in Rails, User has many Posts, Post belongs to User. Two different models, two different tables. Simple. But what if a model needs to reference itself? Like same table, same mode
Let me rewind to a Tuesday afternoon I’d rather forget. We had a Rails monolith that had grown fat and happy over five years. The dashboard—a beautiful, chart-filled monster—was running a 12-second query every time the CEO clicked “refresh.” Twelve seconds of GROUP BY, COUNT(DISTINCT), and LEFT JOIN hell across a million-row events table. The CEO didn’t yell. He just stared at the spinning cursor
The Problem Most engineers deploy to Kubernetes by clicking buttons in a UI. I built Archnet — a fully automated Internal Developer Platform What is an Internal Developer Platform? An IDP is the infrastructure layer that sits between your code How code gets deployed How secrets are managed How the system monitors itself How failures get detected and fixed Most companies pay Humanitec or Backsta
We had ArgoCD running perfectly. Every deployment was reconciled from Git. Drift detection worked. Rollbacks were one-click. Our GitOps setup was clean. Developers still couldn't provision a staging environment without pinging the platform team. That gap — between "GitOps in place" and "developers can actually self-serve" — is where most platform engineering teams get stuck. GitOps solves a real p