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. 2 days ago ·  Video

    Hussain Akram & Antonio Carlos de Souza: Rails Scales for the Rest of Us

    Hussain Akram is an engineering manager at Donorbox, and Antonio Carlos de Souza (AC) is its chief architect, working on a Rails app that has helped nonprofits raise money online and in person for more than a decade. Robby, Hussain, and AC get into how Donorbox handles serious traffic with a deliberately boring setup, why the team moved CI back onto developers' machines, and how they're pulling older parts of the app back toward Rails defaults. They also talk about how they use agent docs to steer AI tools toward the patterns they want the codebase to follow. Links: Donorbox - https://donorbox.org 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.

  2. 1 Sept ·  Video

    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 ingestion pipeline. They also get into feature flags versus database configuration, and where AI tooling fits in when the software you ship moves money. Links: Ascend - https://www.useascend.com/ 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.

  3. 18 Aug ·  Video

    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 leaning on a gem that is no longer maintained. They also talk about what happened when the team went fully agentic, and why Rails magic is easier to understand when an agent can trace it for you. Links: Sixfold - https://www.sixfold.ai Hatchet - https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet 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.

  4. 4 Aug ·  Video

    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 could make bundle install dramatically faster, and the real reasons gems reach for native C extensions in the first place. They also have a candid conversation about how Aaron actually uses AI day to day, from digging through unfamiliar code at Shopify's scale to building a JPEG encoder almost entirely with Claude, and why he still can't quite bring himself to trust it the way he trusts a longtime teammate. Links Tenderlove Shopify Ractors RubyGems.org FFI  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.

  5. 8 Jul ·  Video

    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.

  6. 30 Jun ·  Video

    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.

  7. 12 Jun ·  Video

    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.

  8. 15 May ·  Video

    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.

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Rails Foundation, Robby Russell
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ruby on Rails
  • Show Website
    On Rails

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