If I had to pick one engineering team to write up how they make (and keep) Rails running fast, it’d be Shopify’s. What a treat! Part of Shopify’s success with Ruby on Rails is an emphasis on writing fast code. But, how do you really write fast code? Largely, that’s context sensitive to the problem you’re trying to solve. Let’s talk about a few ways to start writing faster code in Active Record, Rails, and Ruby.
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Shopify’s engineering team has been doing some serious engineering on their codebase: Shopify is one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in existence. It has been worked on for over a decade by more than a thousand developers. It encapsulates a lot of diverse functionality from billing merchants, managing 3rd party developer apps, updating products, handling shipping and so on. It was initially built as a monolith, meaning that all of these distinct functionalities were built into the same codebase with no boundaries between them. For many years this architecture worked for us, but eventually, we reached a point where the downsides of the monolith were outweighing the benefits. We had a choice to make about how to proceed. Click through for a breakdown of the benefits/drawbacks of monoliths and what they build to address the drawbacks without losing the benefits.
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