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. 19H AGO

    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.

    1h 12m

  2. APR 22

    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.

    1h 52m

  3. APR 13

    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.

    1h 46m

  4. 12/09/2025

    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.

    1h 40m

  5. 11/19/2025

    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 shares practical ways to experiment with traces, metrics, and logs in both production and local development. GitHub: https://github.com/kaylareopelle  🧰 Tools & Libraries Mentioned ActiveSupport::Notifications: Rails’ pub/sub API used for instrumentation. AppSignal: Rails-friendly APM and error tracking. AWS X-Ray: Distributed tracing for AWS services. Datadog: Full-stack observability platform. Elastics Profiling Spec: Donated profiling format for OpenTelemetry. Grafana: Open-source dashboards and visualization. Honeybadger : Error monitoring for Ruby apps. Jaeger: Distributed tracing system (CNCF). New Relic Ruby Agent: APM agent for Ruby and Rails. ObservableGauge (OTel Metrics): Async gauge for snapshots like queue size. OpenTelemetry Collector: Pipeline for receiving and exporting telemetry data. OpenTelemetry Logger Bridge: Sends Ruby logger output to OTEL. OpenTelemetry Ruby: Vendor-agnostic telemetry for Ruby. OpenTelemetry Ruby SIG: Community group maintaining OTEL Ruby. Prometheus: Metrics collection and storage. Rack Middleware: Web middleware stack used in many Rails instrumentations. Rails Structured Logging / Event Reporter: Structured logs built into Rails. 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.

    1h 2m

  6. 11/03/2025

    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 consistency, and navigates the trade-offs of GraphQL federation. 🧰 Tools & Libraries Mentioned ActiveAdmin: Admin UI for Rails. after_commit_everywhere: Run code after commits. Datadog: App and CI/CD observability. FactoryBot: Build test data. GraphQL: API layer for SPAs. Kafka: Event streaming backbone. Packwerk: Enforce boundaries in monoliths. PaperTrail: Model change auditing. React: Front-end framework. Sidekiq: Background job processing. Sorbet: Gradual Ruby types. TypeScript: Typed JavaScript. explicit_activerecord: Guard writes to models. Ruby Koans: Learn Ruby by practice. Cracking the Coding Interview: Interview prep book. Gusto Engineering Blog: Posts from Gusto engineers. 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.

    1h 33m

  7. 10/21/2025

    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 adopted multiple async job solutions for different types of work rather than seeking a one-size-fits-all approach. Alex shares insights on consolidating microservices back into their monolith, creating the Boba gem to extend type generation capabilities, using production data subsetting tools for local development, and successfully onboarding engineers without Rails experience in under a month while staying current on Ruby 3.4 and Rails 7.2. Tools & Libraries Mentioned Active Job – Framework-agnostic job API built into Rails. ASDF – Tool version manager. Boba – AngelList’s Sorbet compiler extension. Delayed Job – Database-backed job processor. FactoryBot – Test data builder. GoodJob – Postgres-backed Active Job processor. GraphQL Batch Loader – Batching utility for GraphQL. GraphQL Ruby – Ruby GraphQL implementation. Linear – Issue tracking tool. Money – currency handling library. Packwerk – Shopify’s modular boundary enforcement tool. Paperclip – Legacy file attachment gem for Rails (deprecated). RSpec – Ruby testing framework. Sidekiq – Redis-backed job framework. Solid Queue – Rails 8 Active Job adapter. Sorbet – Gradual static type checker for Ruby. State Machines – Finite state machine support. Tapioca – Sorbet RBI file generator. Temporal – Workflow orchestration system. Tonic – De-identified datasets platform. Will Larson – 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.

    1h 29m

  8. 10/07/2025

    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 from managing 84,000 tests, scaling across 10 PostgreSQL databases, and maintaining Rails upgrades across a fast-moving organization using systematic approaches like dual-boot deployments and careful backporting strategies.   Tools & Libraries Mentioned AWS Aurora (PostgreSQL) – Production database platform, scaled to 10+ writers and 15+ readers.Capybara – End-to-end testing of UI flows in the monolith.Capybara Lockstep –JavaScript sync layer reducing flakiness in React-driven feature specs.Datadog – Application performance monitoring for production systems.Docker – Local PostgreSQL and other data stores.FactoryBot – Identified as a major performance bottleneck in large test suites.factory_fixtures – Shopify gem extending fixtures with inline factory-style overrides. GitHub Copilot – Workflow automation and onboarding support.Heroku CI – Previously used for parallelized CI builds before moving to custom infrastructure.Jenkins – Original CI platform before scaling up to more powerful infrastructure.Minitest – Primary test framework, used throughout the monolith with some extensions.Packwerk – Used to modularize their monolith into engines with explicit boundaries and dependency declarations. PostgreSQL – Core relational database behind their production and local environments.React – Primary frontend framework, integrated into the Rails monolith via a single-page app architecture. Ruby on Rails – The framework behind Doctolib’s 3-million-line monolith and most of their core product infrastructure.safe-pg-migrations – Tool to reduce downtime risks during large-scale schema changes.Sentry – Error tracking and visibility tool 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.

    1h 18m
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
10 Ratings

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
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ruby on Rails
  • Show Website
    On Rails

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