Why I use Render, Webflow, and Ruby On Rails

Render and Webflow are two tolls that save me a lot of time, especially since I am a solo founder and need to juggle not only development but also talking to potential users, doing marketing, taxes, and what else comes to the table.

Render:
I chose Render because I want my tools to have the least friction possible. I am a team of one and I need things to be automated and easy, since I have to juggle my time around marketing, talking to users, development, and product management. I've worked in big companies and I know how much it needs to deploy an application reliably, including scalability. Render takes care of all of that with just a git push, which I am doing anyway, or a click of a button. It might be more expensive compared to when using standalone Infrastructure on Hetzner, Linode, etc., but it comes with a big plus that I don't need to take care of DevOps at all and as long as Render is capable of scaling with the application (which it is!), I might not even need a DevOps team at all, which is a big plus.

Webflow:
The same thing as with Render basically. I could just develop a website with, say, GatsbyJS and Contenful as a CMS, but I chose not to, mainly thinking of the future. If I want a design change on Webflow, I can tell anyone to do it and it's done. No one has to touch code. With GatsbyJS and Contentful, the content is flexible, but the design and architecture, for instance, are not. I am thinking of future marketing landing pages, blogs, etc. - There is no coding involved with Webflow, hence why I can give any website changes to anyone and they would be capable of doing it, plus even for me, it doesn't take long to change some things about the website. It saves me precious time now and later.

and a plus - Ruby on Rails: (This is personal preference and experience though!)
Ruby on Rails has a proven track record as it is used by big companies like GitHub or Shopify. Plus it comes with batteries included - creating new models, views, controllers, etc. is done quickly without much coding involved initially which is a great time-saver, especially in the beginning. But I am also thinking of things like scheduling, maintainability, job queues, etc. - these things usually require third-party libraries, but with Rails - it's just there. I don't have to pick and choose which libraries to take for what, but instead, I can focus entirely on development without switching between projects, documentation, etc. - another big time and pain saver for me and the reason why I went with Ruby on Rails.

This is just a tiny bit of the "easy" tools I use to run Testkit.

I would love to hear about the tools that make your life as a founder, and/or engineer easier and help you achieve more, faster. 🛠