Hundreds of Shopify developers work on our largest codebase, the monolithic Rails application that powers most of our product offering. There are various benefits to having a “majestic monolith,” but also a few downsides.

There’s an interesting pattern I’ve discovered recently in Ruby that is very powerful, yet apparently not widely known or appreciated. I call this pattern the Module Builder Pattern.

Ruby on rails is a great framework for rapid web application development, which makes it an ideal tool for a startup. But we often hear people talk about Rails scalability issues when a startup project grows too large.

I began asking myself this question when I was working on a large Rails project. Requirements changed fairly often and we needed to react quickly.

There are times, when we want to leverage power of NoSQL with our Rails application. There are many NoSQL database available such as Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB etc. In this tutorial we’ll explore integrating DynamoDB with Ruby on Rails.

Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process.

In this post, I will try to address these issues by going back to the thesis of Roy Fielding’s dissertation Architectural Styles and the Designs of Network Based Architectures

Have you ever wanted to physically or verbally abuse a computer because it just wouldn’t do things right, or you couldn’t figure out how to make it function properly? And how often have you thought, “How could any programmer think this was a sane idea?”