A story of Rails encryption

This story starts in October of 2019. I was in the Basecamp meetup in Chicago two weeks after joining the company. During an internal presentation, David talked about the need to raise the bar when it came to privacy for the new product the company was working on, codenamed Haystack, now HEY.We all were busy with all kinds of projects preparing for HEY launch, and I got in charge of the data privacy one. Details at this point were fuzzy, but we knew we wanted some database encryption technology and an auditable Rails console that protected access to sensitive data.