Keeping the Rails Magic Alive After 18 Years
Wade Winningham • Philadelphia, PA • Talk

Date: July 08, 2025
Published: not published
Announced: unknown

Hear from someone who wrote the first line of code for a Rails app started in 2007 that's over 3 million lines of code today. Learn from our journey migrating to a Component Based Rails Application (CBRA) and tools we've open sourced along the way which you may not have heard about, but can help with any Rails application.

Our mantra is Build vs Buy. Learn what that means and if it makes sense for you. We've built our own messenger app, telephony services, support ticket system, project management software, and other apps. Why would we build stuff rather than buy or subscribe to existing apps? We even built our own cloud. I'll explain the experiences that set us on that path.

Our ongoing journey towards a Component Based Rails Application (CBRA). An application of fully gem/engine-based components. I'll discuss lessons learned and why we persist with CBRA when everyone else with a Rails monolith app is going with Packwerk.

Open source tools we've built and how they can help any Rails application. We have a number of public gems and tools like cobra_commander, which helps manage Component Based Rails apps, power-tools, a collection of utility gems useful in any Rails app, and, last but not least, our Playbook Design System which is full design system for Rails, Swift, and React. RailConf will be the first place we've ever talked about these publicly.
At the end, hopefully attendees walk out more confident in choosing Rails for the long haul, armed with knowledge and tools that helped our company go big and keep up with the scale of our growth.

RailsConf 2025