I never thought I would be a web developer. I wanted to program video games and interactive art experiences. It wasn't until I took a programming bootcamp that I realized how wrong I'd been to ignore web development. I learned how to rent a server, build the project, expose it on a local port, then point a domain at it. Now anyone on the internet can view my project. THIS is what excites me about web development. 

Once the friction is removed from configuring and maintaining your deployments, then what works on your machine becomes what you can easily share with the world.

I have Docker sites deployed to my servers. To update a website I used to:

I could make this simpler by using a hosting service to deploy upon a push, but I want to own my processes. I don't want my deployments depending on a third party, and I'm not trying to get locked into a platform that ultimately wants to charge me for using it. I now use Kamal, a free deployment tool from the Rails team that makes zero-downtime Docker deploys simple and self-hosted.

Here's the new workflow when I need to update my sites:

I instantly see the docker image build on MY hardware, I see it push to the registry, I see my server pull the latest image, I see it spin up the new container, verify it's working, then it swaps over to the updated container. I just got a zero-downtime update deployed. If I need to rollback, no worries, just kamal rollback to the specific image. I recently had a client reach out to me about a site update, and I made the change and ran kamal deploy. Done. I used to manage pm2 processes, or build on the server; all sorts of wild stuff, now I just run one command. My time has been given back to me, so instead of babysitting my servers I can spend more time building my new game.

Here's my advice if you want easy to maintain software deployments

That's it. Have fun building!