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We compare neo-graph databases, Postgres, LadybugDB, and DuckDB, to understand the user experience and general performance.

Give a team one prompt. Watch them completely diverge. The differences reveal something most product teams never talk about.

AI is changing software development, yet Ruby on Rails remains one of the best frameworks for building reliable, cost-effective custom web applications.

This is an adapted excerpt from Chapter 15 of Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game, my book on building maintainable Ruby on Rails applications usin...

A recent Rails addition lets in_order_of group several values into one sort position. Build a support queue that floats active work to the top and sinks finished tickets, all in one query.

Automated scans taught me about some web stuff I forgot or never even know.

📌 Overview Ruby on Rails has helped make it possible to scale out the database layer, meeting the demands of millions of Aura Frames customers enjoying their digital photo frames. In late 2025, the team added additional primary databases to expand capacity for peak write and read load ahead of Christmas Day, the busiest day of the year for the company. Rails manages queries and schema changes for each primary database within the same codebase, and now with the additional capacity of many primary databases. With 8 primary databases in total, each server instance can be vertically scaled ahead of peak load. When load returns to normal levels, instances are scaled down for cost savings. The team leveraged native support for Multiple Databases and the disable_joins: true feature in Active Record, the ORM for Ruby on Rails. The disable_joins feature replaces SQL joins, issuing multiple SELECT statements to combine data in the application from different databases. This post looks back at the technical details of that plan, as well as a variety of additional data layer scaling tactics, that culminated in a successful Christmas 2025 season, with peak U.S. and Canadian Apple App Store and Google Play Store rankings of #1.

add_index looks like a one-line fix for slow queries. It isn't. This article walks through the failure modes, proves each one with EXPLAIN on half a million rows, and shows how to build an index the optimizer will actually use.

You won’t want to skip this one

Learn how to set up local parallel testing in Rails with turbo_tests, including worker-specific databases and automated database preparation for faster RSpec runs.

Callbacks promise that something always happens when a record changes. They can't keep that promise, and Rails documents the ways out. Every failure mode here ran against ActiveRecord 8.1 before it went in, and the replacement is a command with one door.

Credit: Unsplash / beth_k Once, I got an email. To paraphrase, it said: I ignored your recommendation, but new evidence arrived, and now I see that you were right. I won’t do that again. A ra…

Playwright records every test in cinematic detail. Most Rails devs aren’t watching.

What to do in the first 90 days after your Rails app gets acquired.

Procman is a tool written in Rust that offers a TUI interface to manage processes defined in a Procfile.

This week I made a refactor to remove a job (ActiveJob::Base) that was used only in recurring.yml, and call a class method directly instead. Sometimes it is ok to have a job, but sometimes using the method can help you write a little less code. And...

Move from "here's the story of the system" to "here's what's red and here's the intervention that makes sense for your situation."

Tired of installing NodeJS and juggling version managers just to compile Rails assets? Learn how Bun’s standalone binary can make setup faster and simpler.

Watch the Builder Methods workshop — the plan-first method for building apps with AI that come out right the first time.

How SOLID changes when you read it through Ruby’s object model, duck typing, and preference for pragmatic design.