The Backstory

A habit tracker, built twice.

2009

It started as a simple idea: pick the habits you want to build, check off days on a calendar, and watch your streaks grow.

Kunal and I built the original Rootein over a few months — Ruby on Rails, hand-written CSS, no frameworks, no shortcuts. We were learning as we went, making every decision together, writing every line by hand.

It worked. Green meant you were on target. Red meant you were slacking. The visual feedback kept you honest. Simple, and effective.

Then, like most side projects, life happened. The app went offline. The code gathered dust.

But the idea never really went away.

2026

Seventeen years later, I dusted it off. Partly to bring Rootein back to life, partly as an excuse to write Ruby again and see what's new with Rails. Same look. Same feel. But this time, what took months, took hours.

I handled the early scaffolding — generating controllers, models, migrations — and made all the tech stack choices: Rails 8, Hotwire, Tailwind, PostgreSQL, deployed on DigitalOcean App Platform. No frontend frameworks. No unnecessary gems. Just Rails, the DHH way.

Then I let Claude Opus 4.6 drive. It built the UI, the calendar logic, drag-and-drop reordering, email reminders, and this very page you're reading.

It's free, it works, and it's weirdly fun to check off days. Try it.

— Amit, February 2026

The Receipts

Claude and I kept notes along the way. Every decision, every lesson, every phase of the plan — it's all in the repo.

WHY.md

The vision — why this exists and what it's intentionally not solving.

PLAN.md

The build plan — 10 phases from "one rootein in the database" to deployment.

DECISIONS.md

Every stack decision, logged as we made them. Rails 8, no Devise, no SPA.

LEARNINGS.md

What I learned — Rails concepts, DHH philosophy, gotchas, and patterns.