On Rails
On Rails invites Rails developers to share real-world technical challenges and solutions, architectural decisions, and lessons learned while building with Rails. Through technical deep-dives and retrospectives with experienced engineers in the Rails community, we explore the strategies behind building and scaling Rails applications. Hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon and produced by the Rails Foundation.
Episodes
Eddie Galindo & Kagen Hearn: Rate Limiting For Your Customers
Eddie Galindo is an engineering lead at Ascend and Kagen Hearn is a senior software engineer there, working on a Rails app that helps insurance agencies move and reconcile money.Robby chats with Eddie and Kagen about why Ascend still runs one Rails monolith five years in, what changed when much larger customers started arriving, and how the team went about finding the real limits of their data ing
Joanna Wang: Code Is Cheap Now; Developers Still Valuable
Joanna Wang is a senior software engineer at Sixfold, where the team builds AI underwriting tools that help insurance companies gather data and assess risk. She came to Ruby on Rails after working across Java, Go, Python, and Node.Robby and Joanna get into why the homegrown orchestration they built on state machines and callbacks turned brittle, what moving to Hatchet changed, and the tradeoffs of
Aaron Patterson: Ractors, JIT Compilers, and Rewriting How Gems Install
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Aaron Patterson, better known online as Tenderlove, a senior staff engineer on Shopify’s Ruby infrastructure team and a longtime contributor to both Ruby and Rails Core. Aaron and Robby chat about how Ractors are finally bringing true multi-core parallelism to Ruby, the proposal Aaron has pitched to RubyGems.org for content addressable gems that coul
Bryce Harlan: A Decade of Rails in Healthcare
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Bryce Harlan, a senior engineer at Phamily, the text-based chronic care management platform built by Jaan Health. Bryce has spent the last decade helping evolve Phamily's Ruby on Rails platform, which helps clinical practices coordinate between-visit care for patients with chronic conditions — sending and receiving roughly 100,000 Twilio SMS mes
Nikky Southerland: Lessons from 13 Years of Rails at the Auto Shop
Robby is joined by Nikky Southerland, Lead Software Engineer at Shop-Ware — a cloud-based platform that helps independent automotive service shops run their businesses. Ruby on Rails has powered Shop-Ware since the first line of code was written back in 2013, and more than a decade later the codebase is still 90%+ Rails.Robby talks with Nikky about what it actually takes to keep a mature Rails app
DHH: Basecamp 5, Vibe Coding, and the Future of Rails
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, joins Robby Russell the same week 37signals shipped Basecamp 5 to talk through the shift reshaping how software actually gets built today: why he reversed his "write every character by hand" stance, why he now considers taking AI seriously a professional obligation, and how cheap experimentation ("git res
Tom Rossi: Staying as Rails as Possible
Tom Rossi, co-founder of Higher Pixels and the team behind Buzzsprout, joins Robby to talk about what it really looks like to stay "as Rails as possible", purely out of pragmatism. With over 472,000 podcasts on the platform and a team of fewer than ten people, Tom explains how sticking to vanilla Rails has been the foundation of Buzzsprout's ability to move fast, stay lean, and keep
Jason Meller: Rails, Security, and the AI Advantage
Jason Meller, founder of Kolide (acquired by 1Password in 2023) and now VP of Product at 1Password, joins Robby for a conversation about a career at the intersection of Rails, cybersecurity, and building.They dig into why Rails has become one of the most token-efficient architectures for LLM-assisted development, and why that advantage matters as token costs increasingly shape what's worth bu
Brian Scanlan: Building AI-First at Intercom
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, where a 15-year-old Rails monolith with millions of lines of code sits at the heart of the business.Brian shares how Intercom's philosophy of being "technically conservative" has kept their engineering organization productive and focused on shipping product rather than managing infr
Simone Carletti: Rails at the Center of DNSimple
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Simone Carletti, CTO of DNSimple, where Rails has sat at the core of a globally distributed DNS platform since the company launched in 2010. Simone walks through how DNSimple's infrastructure is organized across three primary languages - Ruby on Rails, Go, and Erlang - each chosen deliberately for the role it plays: Rails powering the main appli
Jay Tennier: How Testing Platform Rainforest QA Tests Itself
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Jay Tennier, Engineering Manager at Rainforest QA, where he's spent over seven years working across a long-lived Rails monolith and supporting services. They explore how Rainforest maintains their platform with a small team, and the practical decisions that come with that reality. Jay shares lessons from pulling microservices back into the monol
Kayla Reopelle: What Your Rails App Is Trying To Tell You
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Kayla Reopelle, a lead software engineer at New Relic, where she works on both the Ruby Agent and OpenTelemetry RubyGems. They explore what observability means for Rails developers—not just as a debugging tool, but as a way to build clearer, more reliable systems. Kayla explains OpenTelemetry's vendor-agnostic approach to instrumentation and sha
Miguel Conde & Peter Compernolle: Inside Gusto’s Rails Biolith
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Miguel Conde and Peter Compernolle from Gusto, where they work on a "biolith"—two distinct Rails monoliths serving 600+ engineers. Peter leads the HIPAA-compliant benefits domain, while Miguel is extracting the time product from the main monolith. They explore how Gusto identifies boundaries, manages temporal data, handles eventual consiste
Alexander Stathis: Scaling a Modular Rails Monolith at AngelList
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Alexander Stathis, a Principal Software Engineer at AngelList, where Rails powers complex investment, accounting, and banking business logic across a modular monolith structure. They explore how AngelList maintains conceptual boundaries in their codebase, uses gradual typing to influence their Ruby style away from Rails “magic,” and why they’ve adopt
Florent Beaurain: Optimizing Rails Tests at Doctolib Scale
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Florent Beaurain, a longtime Rails engineer at Doctolib, home to one of the largest Rails monoliths in Europe with over 3 million lines of code and 400+ engineers. They explore how Doctolib’s team tackled massive test suite performance issues, including cutting one engine’s test time from seven minutes to under one minute. Florent shares insights fro
Hilary Stohs-Krause: Scaling Rails with Small Wins
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Hilary Stohs-Krause, a Senior Software Engineer at Red Canary. They explore how engineering teams approach everyday performance work, from small Active Record optimizations to larger architectural decisions. Hilary shares insights from Red Canary's journey switching from React to Rails' native Hotwire stack, how her team tackled flaky test
Ryan Stawarz & Austin Story: Inside Doximity’s 15-Year Rails Monolith
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Ryan Stawarz and Austin Story from Doximity, where Ruby on Rails has powered the core of their platform for over 15 years. The trio digs into how a single Rails monolith has evolved to support 100+ engineers and a mobile-first experience for millions of healthcare professionals. From front-end framework migrations to API architecture, they explore th
Nadia Odunayo & Scaling Rails for Millions of Users as a Solo Dev
In this episode of On Rails, Nadia Odunayo, founder and solo developer of The StoryGraph, joins us to share what it really takes to build and maintain a Rails application used by over four million readers across web and mobile.We discuss lessons from launching a PWA, shifting to Turbo Native for cross-platform support, and navigating challenges like in-app purchases and data syncing between system
Jean Boussier & IO-Bound Misconceptions
Jean Boussier, Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify and member of the Rails Core team, joins Robby to dig into the performance realities behind modern Rails apps.They explore what it means to be IO-bound or CPU-bound, how Ruby’s Global VM Lock affects concurrency, and why "fast" is too vague to be useful. Jean explains why instrumentation is often the missing piece and shares thoughtful appr
Rosa Gutiérrez & Solid Queue
In this episode of ‘On Rails’, host Robby Russell (@planetargon) chats with Rosa Gutiérrez, Principal Programmer at 37signals, about the technical decisions behind Solid Queue - a database-backed job queue replacing Resque in their Rails apps.Rosa dives into why her team built Solid Queue, how it improves reliability, visibility, and maintainability, and the challenges of migrating live apps like
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