How runa.sh started

After a few years without much web related projects I decided to build another Rails app to help me run scripts on a little cluster I made to test my chess engine.

Every change on the engine need to be tested on tens of thousand of chess games to get a statistically significant result. But managing scripts on multiple servers through SSH and Screen got old pretty quickly.

This was the perfect excuse to test Rails 7.0 and Turbo to make a dynamic app without JavaScript, just like the cluster was itself a justification to keep an unused part of the house above freezing during the winter. I also spent years working on background jobs and I wanted to explore some new things on that space.

Right now I'm on the fence about whether I should build a little SaaS out of it by launching a new virtual machine in the cloud every time someone run a task and make the service highly scalable or focus on a minimalist on-premise open source app to manage tasks on local servers.