On Rails

Tom Rossi: Staying as Rails as Possible

Tom Rossi, co-founder of Higher Pixels [https://www.higherpixels.com/] and the team behind Buzzsprout [https://www.buzzsprout.com/], 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.com * Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com * Buzzsprout Blog: https://www.buzzsprout.com/blog * Tick (time tracking): https://www.tickspot.com * Donor Tools: https://www.donortools.com * StreamCare: https://www.streamcare.com * Higher Pixels joins the Rails Foundation: https://rubyonrails.org/2025/2/18/higher-pixels-joins-foundation Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2462975/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://rubyonrails.org/foundation], and hosted by Robby Russell [https://robbyonrails.com/about/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails] of Planet Argon [https://www.planetargon.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails], a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications [https://www.planetargon.com/services?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails].

Jason Meller: Rails, Security, and the AI Advantage

Jason Meller [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-meller-04498230/], founder of Kolide (acquired by 1Password in 2023) and now VP of Product at 1Password [https://1password.com/], 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 [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2462975/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://rubyonrails.org/foundation], and hosted by Robby Russell [https://robbyonrails.com/about/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails] of Planet Argon [https://www.planetargon.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails], a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications [https://www.planetargon.com/services?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails].

Brian Scanlan: Building AI-First at Intercom

In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Brian Scanlan [https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/], Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom [https://www.intercom.com/], 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/overview [https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview] * Rotoscope — Shopify's tool for identifying test subsets — https://github.com/Shopify/rotoscope [https://github.com/Shopify/rotoscope] * Honeycomb — Observability and tracing — https://www.honeycomb.io/ [https://www.honeycomb.io/] * RuboCop — Ruby linting and static analysis — https://rubocop.org/ [https://rubocop.org/] * Snowflake — Cloud data warehouse — https://www.snowflake.com/ [https://www.snowflake.com/] * Datadog — Monitoring and metrics — https://www.datadoghq.com/ [https://www.datadoghq.com/] * GitHub Dependabot — Automated dependency updates — https://github.com/dependabot [https://github.com/dependabot] * Console1984 — Rails console audit trail gem — https://github.com/basecamp/console1984 [https://github.com/basecamp/console1984] *  Playwright — Browser automation (mentioned re: token consumption) — https://playwright.dev/ [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 [https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2462975/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://rubyonrails.org/foundation], and hosted by Robby Russell [https://robbyonrails.com/about/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails] of Planet Argon [https://www.planetargon.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails], a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications [https://www.planetargon.com/services?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails].

Simone Carletti: Rails at the Center of DNSimple

In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Simone Carletti [https://simonecarletti.com/], CTO of DNSimple [https://dnsimple.com/], 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 [https://sidekiq.org/]: Background job processing (enterprise edition). RSpec [https://rspec.info/]: Testing framework. Knapsack [https://github.com/KnapsackPro/knapsack]: Parallel test suite splitting. Lograge [https://github.com/roidrage/lograge]: Structured JSON logging for Rails. ViewComponent [https://viewcomponent.org/]: Component-based view layer for Rails. Hanami [https://hanamirb.org/]: Ruby web framework, used for portions of the DNSimple API. PostgreSQL [https://www.postgresql.org/]: Primary relational database. ClickHouse [https://clickhouse.com/]: Analytics database for DNS query log processing. Erlang/OTP [https://www.erlang.org/]: Runtime for DNSimple's custom name server (ErlyDNS). Go [https://go.dev/]: Language powering DNSimple's zone server. Docker / Docker Compose [https://www.docker.com/]: Used to run the full DNSimple infrastructure stack locally. Cursor [https://www.cursor.com/] / Claude Code [https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview]: AI coding tools adopted across the DNSimple team. Terraform / Infrastructure as Code [https://www.terraform.io/]: Used to manage DNSimple's own domains and GitHub repositories. Books Mentioned Eloquent Ruby [https://pragprog.com/titles/elruby/eloquent-ruby/] by Russ Olsen Design Patterns [https://www.informit.com/store/design-patterns-elements-of-reusable-object-oriented-9780201633610] (Gang of Four) Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2462975/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://rubyonrails.org/foundation], and hosted by Robby Russell [https://robbyonrails.com/about/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails] of Planet Argon [https://www.planetargon.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails], a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications [https://www.planetargon.com/services?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails].

Jay Tennier: How Testing Platform Rainforest QA Tests Itself

In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Jay Tennier [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaytennier/], Engineering Manager at Rainforest QA [https://www.rainforestqa.com/], 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 [https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_basics.html]: Rails ORM.   BigQuery [https://cloud.google.com/bigquery]: Hosted analytics warehouse.   Cube.js [https://cube.dev/]: API layer for querying analytics data.   DRY-Monads [https://dry-rb.org/gems/dry-monads/]: Structured success/failure flow.   FactoryBot [https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot]: Test data factories.   Grape [https://github.com/ruby-grape/grape]: Ruby API framework. GoodJob [https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job]: Background job processor.   Q Classic [https://github.com/rainforestapp/queue_classic]: DB-backed job queue.    Redash [https://redash.io/]: SQL-based dashboards and reporting.   RSpec [https://rspec.info/]: Rails testing framework.   React [https://react.dev/]: Front-end application framework.   Haml [https://haml.info/]: Legacy templating engine.   Segment [https://segment.com/] / Mixpanel [https://mixpanel.com/]: Event tracking pipelines. Books Mentioned Confident Ruby [https://pragprog.com/titles/agcr/confident-ruby/] by Avdi Grimm   Exceptional Ruby [https://pragprog.com/titles/agrexc/exceptional-ruby/] by Avdi Grimm   Working Effectively with Legacy Code [https://www.informit.com/store/working-effectively-with-legacy-code-9780131177055] by Michael Feathers  Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2462975/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://rubyonrails.org/foundation], and hosted by Robby Russell [https://robbyonrails.com/about/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails] of Planet Argon [https://www.planetargon.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails], a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications [https://www.planetargon.com/services?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=episodenotes&utm_campaign=onrails].