Ruby on Rails

Web framework for the Ruby programming language, created in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). Its defining idea is “Convention over Configuration”: if you follow the conventions, you write very little boilerplate. Rails shaped web development in the 2000s and 2010s more than almost any other framework.

Why Rails Still Matters

The common narrative says Rails is outdated, does not scale, and has been overtaken by Node, Go, or Rust. The counterexample is Shopify: $6.2 billion in revenue in a single shopping night, 31 million API requests per minute, all running on a Rails monolith.

The real problem with “Rails does not scale” was never the framework. It was poor architecture and weak understanding of database work. Shopify disproved that at system level.

Recent Rails-adjacent innovations, many driven by Shopify engineers:

• YJIT - Ruby’s just-in-time compiler, much faster than the plain Interpreter, production-ready since 2022
• Ractors - parallel Ruby execution through thread-safe actors, tested in Shopify production
• Hotwire/Turbo - HTML over the wire instead of JSON APIs for SPAs, DHH’s answer to JavaScript overhead

The Ecosystem Question

Shopify employs almost 50% of all Rails core contributors. That sounds like dependency risk, but it is better read as patronage. The framework is being advanced by a company under real production pressure. Critical bugs are found under millions of requests per second, not in toy projects.

Well-known Rails companies include GitHub, Airbnb, Coinbase, Zendesk, and Square. Most of them could have scaled further or longer if the architecture had been designed correctly.

Connections

• David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) - creator and still an active core contributor
• Shopify - the most important user and patron, running Rails daily at global production scale
• Tobi Lütke - Shopify CEO, Rails veteran, and proof of the founder-programmer combination

Sources

• Six billion reasons to cheer for Shopify - DHH on Rails in Shopify production (2026-04-04)