On Rails

Ryan Stawarz and Austin Story, both Rails engineers at Doximity since 2016, share insights into their journey with Ruby on Rails and GraphQL. They discuss how Doximity evolved a monolithic Rails app to support over 100 engineers and millions of healthcare professionals. Key topics include the integration of GraphQL for mobile optimization, performance challenges, and the use of BatchLoader to handle data efficiently. They highlight the balance between GraphQL and REST, the evolution of front-end technologies, and emphasize a culture of trust to enhance team dynamics.

Nadia Odunayo, founder and solo developer of The StoryGraph, shares insights from running a book-tracking platform with over 4 million users. She discusses the journey from Heroku to YugabyteDB for scaling, and the technical challenges of in-app purchases across multiple platforms. Nadia emphasizes the significance of user feedback while developing mobile apps with Turbo and the hurdles of app discoverability in a competitive landscape. Through her experience, she highlights the value of the Rails community and what it means to be a solo developer by choice.

Jean Boussier, Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify and a key member of the Rails Core team, dives into the intricacies of Rails performance. He explains the distinction between IO-bound and CPU-bound issues and sheds light on Ruby’s Global VM Lock and its concurrency implications. Jean emphasizes the importance of understanding gem dependencies rather than treating them as magic. He shares insightful perspectives on background jobs and performance optimization, advocating for deeper engagement with Rails to enhance development productivity.

Rosa Gutiérrez, Principal Programmer at 37signals, shares her expertise on the development of Solid Queue, a new job management solution in Ruby on Rails. She discusses the decision to replace Resque, emphasizing improved reliability and maintainability. Rosa reveals the challenges faced during the migration of live apps like Hey, including strategies for managing long-running tasks and debugging failures. The conversation also touches on the joy of deleting old code, job scheduling complexities, and her favorite software reads that influence coding practices.