On 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.

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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.

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.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
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.

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)
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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 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/overview
Rotoscope — Shopify's tool for identifying test subsets — https://github.com/Shopify/rotoscope
Honeycomb — 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/dependabot
Console1984 — 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

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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 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.