On Rails

Rails Foundation, Robby Russell

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.

  1. قبل يوم واحد ·  فيديو

    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 messages a day across hundreds of medical groups. Bryce and Robby trade stories about a long-lived Rails app: the unconventional Rails 4-to-6 leap Phamily made during the spring 2020 surge in virtual care, the bespoke "Action Responders" pattern the team built to keep API serialization, authorization, and testing close to the model layer, and how an article from Judoscale on naming Sidekiq queues by their SLA reshaped how the team thinks about background work. They also dig into how Phamily is using Claude Code skills to give engineers "superpowers" on smaller features, and why Bryce now sees test suites as the closest thing to Peter Naur's idea of programming as theory building. Links: Phamily Jaan Health Programming as theory building Judoscale blog: Planning Sidekiq Queues Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ٨ د

  2. ٣٠ يونيو ·  فيديو

    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 moving with a team roughly half the size it used to be, including a frontend migration that's still in progress, the API decision they regretted almost immediately, and the LaunchDarkly kill switches that save them when a third-party integrator goes down. Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ٨ د

  3. ١٢ يونيو ·  فيديو

    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 reset and try again") is changing 37signals from the inside: designers and PMs working directly in code, and even the rigid six-week Shape Up cycle up for reconsideration.  They also trace the history of Rails, including a backend so stable that a model file written today looks at home next to one from 2013, and take a peek at what's headed for Rails, from a Lexical-based editor ("Lexi") headed for ActionText to native passkeys and magic links.  If you're curious where Rails is headed, have a listen. Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س

  4. ١٥ مايو ·  فيديو

    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 up with a rapidly evolving industry. In this episode, Tom walks through Buzzsprout's migration from Paperclip to Active Storage (including what broke spectacularly in production), their recent shift from hand-rolled summary tables to ClickHouse for analytics, and how Hotwire made building the Buzzsprout mobile app surprisingly manageable. He also shares how Buzzsprout's real-world scale, including the monkey patching that resulted from it, led directly to contributions back upstream into Rails itself. Higher Pixels: https://www.higherpixels.comBuzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.comBuzzsprout Blog: https://www.buzzsprout.com/blogTick (time tracking): https://www.tickspot.comDonor Tools: https://www.donortools.comStreamCare: https://www.streamcare.comHigher Pixels joins the Rails Foundation: https://rubyonrails.org/2025/2/18/higher-pixels-joins-foundationSend us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ١١ د

  5. ٦ مايو ·  فيديو

    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 building.  Jason also shares what he's learned about keeping developer environments secure as agentic tools become part of everyday workflows, covering 1Password's open-source SCAM benchmark, how LLMs handle credentials when operating autonomously, and practical steps developers, founders, and engineering leaders can take to stay ahead of it. Tools & Products 1Password (https://1password.com)Kolide (https://kolide.com)Cursor (https://cursor.com)Claude / Claude Opus by Anthropic (https://anthropic.com/claude)OpenAI Codex (https://openai.com)Lovable (https://lovable.dev)CrowdStrike (https://crowdstrike.com)GitLab (https://gitlab.com)Oh My Zsh (https://ohmyzsh.sh)Wiz (https://wiz.io)Projects & Benchmarks SCAM Benchmark by 1Password (https://github.com/1Password/scam)OpenClaw (open-source agentic AI tool)Honest Security Manifesto (https://honest.security)1Password Environments for Developers (https://developer.1password.com/docs/cli/secrets-environment-variables)The Rails Foundation (https://rubyonrails.org/foundation)Books You Can Stop Stupid: Stopping Losses from Accidental and Malicious Actions by Ira Winkler & Tracy Celaya Brown (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119566711)Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ١٢ د

  6. ٢٢ أبريل ·  فيديو

    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 infrastructure complexity, and on Intercom's all-in bet on Claude Code as their singular AI tool, now generating over 95% of daily code, with over 1,000 weekly users across the company including non-engineers in sales, marketing, and finance. Brian explains their approach to automated code review and PR approvals, how they built a Rails console MCP that lets Claude run production queries (with non-engineers as the top users), their layered plugin and skills architecture, and where AI still falls short in open-ended debugging, using the metaphor of commercial airline pilots who know when to disengage the autopilot. Tools & Libraries Mentioned Claude Code — AI coding agent (mandated tool at Intercom) — https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/overviewRotoscope — Shopify's tool for identifying test subsets — https://github.com/Shopify/rotoscopeHoneycomb — Observability and tracing — https://www.honeycomb.io/RuboCop — Ruby linting and static analysis — https://rubocop.org/Snowflake — Cloud data warehouse — https://www.snowflake.com/Datadog — Monitoring and metrics — https://www.datadoghq.com/GitHub Dependabot — Automated dependency updates — https://github.com/dependabotConsole1984 — Rails console audit trail gem — https://github.com/basecamp/console1984 Playwright — Browser automation (mentioned re: token consumption) — https://playwright.dev/Books Mentioned  Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann Blog Posts Mentioned  Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley — https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ٥٢ د

  7. ١٣ أبريل

    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 application and API, Go handling the zone server, and Erlang running their custom-built name servers. He explains why Rails has remained central even as the platform grew well beyond a typical web app, and what it takes to keep a long-lived codebase healthy with a lean team of around 15 engineers. Tools & Libraries Mentioned Sidekiq: Background job processing (enterprise edition). RSpec: Testing framework. Knapsack: Parallel test suite splitting. Lograge: Structured JSON logging for Rails. ViewComponent: Component-based view layer for Rails. Hanami: Ruby web framework, used for portions of the DNSimple API. PostgreSQL: Primary relational database. ClickHouse: Analytics database for DNS query log processing. Erlang/OTP: Runtime for DNSimple's custom name server (ErlyDNS). Go: Language powering DNSimple's zone server. Docker / Docker Compose: Used to run the full DNSimple infrastructure stack locally. Cursor / Claude Code: AI coding tools adopted across the DNSimple team. Terraform / Infrastructure as Code: Used to manage DNSimple's own domains and GitHub repositories. Books Mentioned Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen Design Patterns (Gang of Four) Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ٤٦ د

  8. ٠٩‏/١٢‏/٢٠٢٥

    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 monolith, why they wrap third-party services in adapters, and how they push analytics work to BigQuery instead of straining their Rails database. The conversation covers testing philosophy including "wet tests" over DRY abstractions, using dry-monads for complex service flows, and how celebrating code deletion has become part of their engineering culture. Social + Web Presence LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaytennier/ GitHub: https://github.com/jaytennie/  Twitter/X: https://x.com/jaytennier Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jaytennier.bsky.social Company/Org Links Homepage: https://www.rainforestqa.com/ Tools & Libraries Mentioned Active Record: Rails ORM.   BigQuery: Hosted analytics warehouse.   Cube.js: API layer for querying analytics data.   DRY-Monads: Structured success/failure flow.   FactoryBot: Test data factories.   Grape: Ruby API framework. GoodJob: Background job processor.   Q Classic: DB-backed job queue.    Redash: SQL-based dashboards and reporting.   RSpec: Rails testing framework.   React: Front-end application framework.   Haml: Legacy templating engine.   Segment / Mixpanel: Event tracking pipelines. Books Mentioned Confident Ruby by Avdi Grimm   Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm   Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers  Send us Fan Mail On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.  On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.

    ١ س ٤٠ د
مشاهدة الكل (١٧)

حول

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.

المعلومات

  • صناع العمل
    Rails Foundation, Robby Russell
  • سنوات النشاط
    ٢٠٢٥ - ٢٠٢٦
  • الحلقات
    ١٧
  • التقييم
    فاضح
  • حقوق النشر
    © 2026 Ruby on Rails
  • موقع البرنامج على الويب
    On Rails

قد يعجبك أيضًا