(Includes expletives) David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, joined the show to discuss this Rails moment and renewed excitement for Rails. We discuss hard opinions, developers being cooked too long in the JavaScript soup, finding developer joy, the pros and cons of the BDFL, the ongoing WordPress drama with WP Engine, and what’s to come in Rails 8.

John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He’s early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John’s acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.

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.

In this week’s episode Cameron Dutro, a software engineer at GitHub, Ship It listener and someone with an extraordinary attention to detail, joins us to talk about Kuby, a convention-over-configuration approach to deploying Rails apps.

The question that we will be trying to answer is what happened to Rails Active Deployment. The path to that promise land is paved with good intentions, but it’s complicated.

This week we’re joined by long-time web developer Matt Patterson. Earlier this year Matt wrote an evocative article for A List Apart called The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets. In this episode Matt sits down with Jerod to discuss, in-detail, why he believes the future of the web is server-rendered (again) and how Ruby on Rails is well positioned to bring that future to us today.

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.

Jerod is joined by Andrew Nesbitt and Ben Nickolls to talk Octobox, their open source web app that helps you manage your GitHub notifications. They discuss how Octobox came to be, why open source maintainers love it, the experiments they’re doing with pricing and business models, and how Octobox can continue to thrive despite GitHub’s renewed interest in improving notifications.

We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn’t open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

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.

David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH joined the show to talk through the past, present, and future of Ruby on Rails — the most beloved web application framework in the Ruby community.