On Rails

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machines and callbacks turned brittle, what moving to Hatchet changed, and the tradeoffs of leaning on a gem that is no longer maintained.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
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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.