I think this is the story that we want Rails to be mentioned in, but unfortunately no one cares much about the stack. Nonetheless, it’s a Rails win to me. They’re doing well as a business, and they’re using Rails.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/shopifys-revenue-nearly-doubles-as-covid-19-pushes-shopping-online-11596057094
Thanks to the work that the biggest Rails users have been upstreaming into Rails, it’s much simpler to follow in their footsteps. Rails is now easier to scale right out of the box, and you don’t need to use third party gems or your own customizations to Rails itself to make it work with multiple databases, for instance. So even if you’re experiencing hockeystick growth, you can probably stick with Rails.
You still can go big with rails. Effectively before you scale you need to have a working product and rails gives you the product fastest.
whenever big tech claims rails, i wish i could get a clearer picture. what i don’t see them mention ever is how many servers they run and how much ram they have to provision because rails can be so heavy handed with AR.
> They’re doing well as a business
$123 BILLION market cap, i think that’s an understatement lmao
Shopify is one of the earliest users of Rails. Aren’t they already known as the rails success story?
They made huge contributions to the community in the early days.
I remember the days before Stripe. Adding payment was so complicated. ActiveMerchant library was the goto for adding payments to your ruby and rails apps! Saved a lot of hair pulling. It came out of Shopify.
Lots of people care about the stack. The stack has just matured to a place where it isn’t driven by hype anymore.
If you want some other companies that use Rails at scale, here are a few: Microsoft (GitHub, Yammer, some of their games, probably more AFAIK), Airbnb, Dribble, Fiverr, Bloomberg, Couchsurfing, Cookpad, Amazon (Twitch, GoodReads, a lot of internal tooling, probably more stuff too), Hulu, 37Signals (Basecamp, Hey), Scribd, Groupon, etc..
I think that [this excellent article from Shopify Engineering](https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/write-fast-code-ruby-rails) sums it all up: «*Software development is full of tradeoffs. As developers, we have enough difficult decisions to make while juggling technical debt, code style, and code correctness. This is why optimizing for speed shouldn’t come first.*
*At Shopify, we treat speed as a feature. While it lends itself to better user experiences and lower server bills, it shouldn’t take precedence over the happiness of developers working on an application. Remember to keep your code fun while making it fast!*»
No doubt that Shopify has the merit of bringing to light the strenght of writing simply, effective and readable code with Ruby and Rails.
Shopify should get a lot of credit for bucking the microservices trend too. I am sure they do have some microservices though.