This week we’re talking about type checking with Jake Zimmerman. Jake is one of the leads at Stripe working on Sorbet — an open source project that does Type checking in Ruby and runs over Stripe’s entire Ruby codebase. As of May of 2022 Stripe’s codebase was over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files. If you think you have a bigger Ruby codebase, Jake is down to go byte-for-byte to see who wins. Jake shares tons of wisdom and more importantly he shares why he thinks types will win in the end.

Welcome to 2023 — we’re kicking off the year talking to Justin Searls about the state of web development and why he just might write a “You Might Not Need React” post. He’s been so productive using Turbo and Stimulus (and tailwind) in Rails 7 that we had to talk about the state of Rails development today and a bunch of other fun topics around building for the web in 2023.

Today we talk with two lovely folks from Transistor.fm: Jason Pearl, Senior Software Developer & Jon Buda, co-founder. Gerhard was curious to find out about their setup & how did it change with the launch of the new podcast website builder. After all, you have been hearing us talk about our setup for years, so it was high-time to challenge some assumptions and learn how another team is solving similar problems.

TL;DL: keeping it simple is at the root of smooth operations & stable systems.

Maxime Vaillancourt joined us to talk about Shopify’s massive storefront rewrite from a Ruby on Rails monolith to a completely new implementation written in Ruby. It’s a fairly well known opinion that rewrites are “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make” and generally something “you should never do.” But Maxime and the team at Shopify have proved successful in their efforts in this massive storefront rewrite and today’s conversation covers all the details.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) shares the story of how JavaScript sprinkles in Basecamp evolved into a full-fledged framework called Stimulus. We talked about ins and outs of Basecamp as it is today, Ruby, JavaScript, David’s somewhat new found love for JavaScript, how they open source because they can, and David’s new YouTube series called “On Writing Software Well”.

Mike Perham is back for his 4th appearance to talk about his new project Faktory, a new background job system that’s aiming to bring the best practices developed over the last five years in Sidekiq to every programming language. We catch up with Mike on the continued success and model of Sidekiq, the future of background jobs, his thoughts on RocksDB in Faktory vs BoltDB, Redis, or SQLite, how he plans to support Sidekiq for the next 10 years, and his thoughts on Faktory being a SaaS option in the future.

Sean Griffin joins the show to talk about doing Rails full-time, his love of Rust. and his project Diesel - a safe, extensible ORM and query builder for Rust. We discuss Sean’s path to working full-time on Rails, what he works on specifically, why Rust, why Diesel, and how much of Diesel’s design and featureset is a product of his experience with ActiveRecord and Rails.

Ryan Bigg joined the show to talk about his open source work on the documentation of Ruby on Rails, fund raising, crowd sourcing, departure, handing off, not quitting, making the right decision, getting paid, sustaining, and more.

Big show! Matz, creator of the Ruby programming language, joined the show to discuss where he began as a programmer, the origins of Ruby, its history and future, Ruby 3.0, concurrency and parallelism, Streem, Erlang, Elixir, and more.

Andrew Cantino joined the show to talk with Jerod about Huginn, a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Think of it as a hackable Yahoo! Pipes plus IFTTT on your own server.

Thomas Reynolds, the creator of Middleman, joined the show to talk about the history of static site generators, how he got into open-source, his love for Go, and what’s to come in Middleman v4.

Brandon Mathis joined the show to tell us all about the much anticipated 3.0 release of Octopress - his Jekyll-based blogging framework for hackers. Octopress 3.0 is a complete rewrite and has been in the works for quite a while. We find out why Brandon decided to go for The Big Rewrite and what’s been taking so long (hint: it’s not because the dude’s been slackin’).

Mike Perham joined the show to talk about sustaining open source software, living a healthy life, how to treat one another, and more.

Our guests this week are 2015’s RUBY HEROES! Big show today, lots of great Ruby talk with these heroes, great insights from this past year of Ruby, and more.

Adam and Jerod talk with Hong Lai, one of the co-founders of Phusion. His company recently got a lot of attention for their upcoming version of Phusion Passenger, which they decided to call Ruby Raptor in a clever marketing play to get people excited about Passenger again. It worked, and we invited Hongli on the show to talk about Passenger/Ruby Raptor, the challenges of marketing open source, and how to get the internet excited about your next version.

Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp and Kenneth Reitz talk with Jeff Atwood about Discourse and more.

Wynn sat down with Wesley Beary from Engine Yard to talk about the Fog project and the Cloud, live from Red Dirt Ruby Conf.

Wynn sat down with Nick Quaranto at Red Dirt Ruby Conference to talk about Gemcutter, RubyGems.org, and how to get started creating your own Ruby gem.