On Rails

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 m...

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 a...

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 re...

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 kee...

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...

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 i...

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 app...

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 mon...

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 sh...

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 consist...

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 ado...

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 f...

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 te...

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...

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 sy...

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 ap...

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 li...