00:00:02
Music plays.
00:00:06
Hello, Rails World — let's get some noise. Who had an afternoon coffee? Me, too. I'll be honest: this is my first ever talk and I read all the slides last night, so this will be a journey for both of us. I'm excited to share it — let's dive in.
00:00:33
Five years ago, and even today, people say Rails is dead: it's too old, too slow, and it won't scale — only boomers use Rails. Honestly, I said the same thing five years ago when my now co-founder Steven suggested we use Rails for our startup. I argued for Node; he insisted on Rails. After hours of back-and-forth I finally relented and let him use Rails. That was one of the worst arguments I've ever made, because Rails turned out to be one of the best things that's happened to me.
00:01:40
Now, five years later, I work at a company called "And." Our mission is to enable others to earn an income online. We believe work should be fun, and becoming an entrepreneur should be simple. We let people spin up many kinds of businesses, and since then we've helped thousands of people earn money — in total, users have earned more than $140 million.
00:02:20
We're a consumer platform with chat, real-time notifications, live streaming, global payments across 200+ countries, and even an app store so developers can build on top of our platform. But, like any good story, it wasn't always easy. I want to tell you about the failures and the journey that got me here, and how Rails gave me a competitive advantage. I hope you leave inspired and ready to type "rails new" and start something.
00:03:08
I want to take you back to the beginning of my journey. In 2014, at age 12, I started as a sneaker-botter — writing automated software to buy limited items from sites like Nike or Supreme and reselling them. That was my introduction to entrepreneurship. In high school I fell in love with programming, building countless apps and websites. None of them got more than 100 users, but it was thrilling to build something people used. After getting rejected from my dream school, I appealed by building an iOS app called Shark Trivia, mailed an iPad with the app to admissions, and four weeks later my decision was overturned — I ended up going to UT.
00:04:32
In 2020, during my third year of college, COVID hit and I suddenly had long stretches of uninterrupted time to code. I started several startups; one got to about $7K MRR but failed. That's when I first used Rails. My co-founder Steven had insisted on Rails for that project, and although the project died, we spent nine months building it. I had never felt joy like I did building with Rails — I was shipping features in days. Coming from a Node/Express background, Rails and ActiveRecord felt like a dream. That project failed, but we kept going: three more Rails startups failed, and in 2021 we started our fourth business.
00:06:08
During COVID a few items were constantly sold out online, and internet entrepreneurs were using bots to buy those items. We found a sketchy Discord server where people were buying and selling software license keys for thousands of dollars via crypto or Cash App — anonymous transactions but high demand. We followed our playbook: rails new, grab a Bootstrap theme, push to Heroku, and see what happens. We launched a niche site selling bots and software; in our first month we sold $25K worth of software, and in our second month we hit $100K. We were building for just tens or hundreds of users, but by talking to customers and shipping faster than anyone else, we scaled quickly.
00:08:19
At the time I was still in college, hacking on Rails nights and weekends. We moved into a hacker house, had monitors everywhere, and shipped constantly. One co-founder lived in a pantry; another developer moved across the world to live in a laundry room — we had no idea what we were doing but Rails kept us moving. We hit 100,000 users — literally a Rails console running in a loop to test production — and that was a milestone. We're now at 12 million users and still growing.
00:09:41
Then in 2022 we ran into our first real scaling issue. We ran "flash drops" — sellers announcing limited releases that drove massive traffic. Running on 2x dynos on Heroku, we got pummeled: request queues spiked and the site went down. We lost customers. We posted on a hiring site saying we'd pay anyone who could stop the site from going down. A developer named Sam responded; within an hour he had production Postgres access and GitHub permissions and fixed some awful N+1 queries and caching issues. After that we could host flash drops — our first scaling problem solved.
00:11:20
But problems kept coming. One Friday night, at dinner with the small team, we got texts and calls: the site was down. It was a nasty Heroku Postgres out-of-memory issue and we couldn't fix it. Our on-call engineer Sam didn't answer his phone, so in a desperate move we called an Uber and paid the driver to knock on Sam's door in New Jersey. Ten minutes later the site was back up — and Sam texted "clever." That taught me that some people will go the extra mile when needed.
00:13:31
Let me give context about another person: Jackson, our 40th user. He was a 19-year-old freshman studying computer science who had never built a web app. Six months later, after joining support and learning, he was shipping features with ActiveRecord and eventually led our backend and payments. That proved the "one-person framework" idea: Rails lets newcomers become productive quickly.
00:14:49
In 2023 we kept iterating, often without a clear vision. We tried Discord paywalls, Telegram paywalls, and even NFTs for a bit — anything to stay alive. We built probably a hundred features and threw out most of them, but Rails' speed let us listen to users and adapt. If anyone claims they had a perfect vision from day one, they're lying: startups evolve by shipping small solutions for a few users and growing from there.
00:15:44
By 2024 we were pushing Rails to new limits as a consumer platform. We envisioned an apps ecosystem where third-party developers could build on top of us; the first app we built was chat, which is very hard. We built chat four times and every time it struggled with modest concurrency. We also built real-time notifications, which were dangerous: a 10,000-person chat could trigger everyone to reply at once and take the whole site down. We iterated on notifications multiple times. Our database journey was rough: we started on Heroku Postgres, moved to self-hosted Postgres (which was a terrible decision and caused 90% CPU issues), then to AWS Aurora, and eventually migrated to PlanetScale (MySQL) with zero downtime. You have to do what keeps you alive, learn, and keep moving.
00:19:11
Why show all of this? The phrase "Rails won't scale" is wrong. Rails gives you the power to reach scaling problems — and if you're hitting those problems, you're doing something right. Most teams never get that far. Rails provided a framework to iterate quickly, embrace failure, and solve problems fast. The issues I described would have occurred on any framework; Rails simply accelerated our path to them and helped us fix them.
00:20:05
Fast forward to 2025: Jackson now leads our backend team and manages payments. Last year our platform processed $140 million. Our engineering team is 15 people, but only three to four engineers maintain the Rails monolith. That's the beauty of Rails: you don't need many resources to support a lot of features. We're currently shipping version 3 of our product — it shipped recently — and we still don't know exactly where we're going, but Rails gives us the ability to iterate and keep moving.
00:21:03
So why am I here? Beyond the outages and engineering stories, code has impact: it lets people become entrepreneurs and spend time doing what they love. Because of this work, people now teach MCAT prep, help others master League of Legends, deliver fitness programs, teach music production, provide data engineering career guidance, and build consumer apps. The code we write enables real people to pursue their purpose and livelihoods.
00:22:37
Rails is at risk: we need more engineers and more startups to pick Rails. I believe Rails is the best tool to start a startup — it's the one-person framework. To change the trajectory, we must build cool things in public and talk about them. Every person here can type "rails new" and build something for five or ten people, then share it. We need content targeted at Gen Z developers — tutorials, TikToks, blog posts, and YouTube videos. Live coding is okay: even if it produces rough code, it gets people building and hooked on Rails. Embrace that first feeling and spread the word.
00:24:08
I have a challenge: if you start something in the next 30 days, I will personally be your first customer. You can use our platform to accept payments in minutes; send me a link and I'll add you to a group of new Rails entrepreneurs so we can cheer each other on and help spread the word. I'm grateful to be here — Rails changed my life and is changing thousands of others. I truly believe it's the best framework on earth, and I want more people to see that.
00:25:22
Music plays.
