From The Keyboard
Hi, I'm Nick Kelly.
I'm a full-stack Rails developer, AI integration specialist, DevUX engineer, and engineering leader. I've spent 19+ years building and shipping production web applications.
About
What I do
I'm a senior engineer who's comfortable across the whole stack — Ruby on Rails, databases, APIs, and the infrastructure underneath. I've led small teams and I still spend most of my time hands-on in the code.
I'm AI-forward by default. I work with various LLMs daily, lean on agentic workflows, I build MCP servers and custom Claude Skills, and I've shipped LLM-powered features to production. I care about using these tools where they genuinely help, not because they're shiny. When they inevitably get in the way I reach for VIM in a TMUX session.
I also care a lot about developer experience — local environments that just work, onboarding measured in hours, and deploy pipelines that get out of your way. I build and maintain Shipyrd, an open-source deployment dashboard for teams.
I'm currently the CTO at OptSpot, where I lead a small software team and stay close to the code — building the product, our internal tooling, and pushing our product forward.
Selected work
Recent Projects
Shipyrd
Open-source deployment dashboard for teams that ship. Plugs into any CI/CD pipeline via Kamal hooks, GitHub Actions, or vendor webhooks (Honeybadger, AppSignal, Rollbar). Ships with environment locking, a Slack bot, and deploy metrics. Self-hosted Community Edition and a hosted SaaS.
Open source · Rails · DevUXBasecamp MCP server
Built and deployed a custom Basecamp MCP server in Claude.ai for company-wide use, putting AI-assisted project context in the hands of every team member — not just engineers running Claude Code locally.
AI integration · MCPLLM-powered customer messaging
Replaced manual templating with personalized, on-brand customer communications generated through an LLM, cutting repetitive work while keeping messages consistent.
AI integrationHealthcare plan cost estimator
A tool that lets employees compare medical plan costs and make informed enrollment decisions for their situation.
Full-stack RailsBuilder Logs
Daily progress reporting for construction job sites — teams capture field data, photos, and safety updates and share them with the right people in real time, no mobile app required.
SaaS · RailsWaldo
Search automation that continuously scans Facebook Marketplace based on user criteria and sends instant alerts — built for resellers sourcing inventory and shoppers hunting specific items.
Full-stack RailsWriting
Recent posts
The current models are finally incredibly useful and incredibly productive, this makes execution cheap. But this only focuses on the initial creation not on the near to long term maintainability of software. The more code you’re shoving in there without some decent guardrails/guides in place the more of a mess you’re building to deal with later. Not to mention the context bloat that this creates and if done poorly contradicting patterns and core principles about how your app functions.
Shipyrd started as a Kamal-first tool. You'd add the shipyrd-gem hook to your deploy.yml, and Kamal would ping Shipyrd at the start and end of each deploy. At…
Contact
Let's talk
If you have a project in mind or want to bounce around an idea, send me a note. I'd love to hear what you're working on.