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
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…
I recently added a few badges that I wanted for collaboration to Shipyrd for a few open and closed-source projects. There are all kinds of badges/shields…
When you’re working on an app with a team, you always have a set of tools/SAAS products that the team uses to triage, monitor, and build your app. Quite a few…
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.