Is that two millions LOC for a single Rails application or across various Rails applications?
It's one single application. Most of the secondary services are powered by go/ruby, running independently in non-monolithic way.
Ex-Hubber
Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
21–30 of 332 posts
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#22Good post and an interesting glimpse into the behind-the-scenes efforts that goes into maintaining Github.
I cannot agree with the "Should I do it too?" section. It probably works very well for an org as large and dedicated as Github, it very likely makes a lot of sense for what they do at the scale they do it at.
For most of us that are consumers of technologies and frameworks, treating the framework as an extension of an application stack, as the blog has outlined, is a terrible idea; it requires devoting time and effort towards its upkeep, and that is not our core business, nor should it be.
That does not, however, mean it's being treated as an unimportant part of the application stack, and implying so is judgmental. It's importance is that you need to be careful about the tech choices you make and understand what the implications will be down the line.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#23We are also running on Rails - and loving it, too. However, incorporating this methodology into our workflow would be both a lot of work to set up and also a lot of work to keep running. There certainly is a size threshold under which this is clearly an overkill and we are under that threshold. Yet, if this could be turned into a product, a clean integration, a command I need to run... would definitely use it (and pa…
The main cost is maintaining high test coverage so that you can be confident in your automation
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#24It is so nice to have the latest releases of both Ruby and Rails run in production as soon as they are released. Huge for indie developers and small teams that use Rails.
Kudos to Shopify too, who are working on improving Ruby tooling a lot recently.
Exciting time to be a Rails dev.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#25Good post and an interesting glimpse into the behind-the-scenes efforts that goes into maintaining Github. I cannot agree with the "Should I do it too?" section. It probably works very well for an org as large and dedicated as Github, it very likely makes a lot of sense for what they do at the scale they do it at. For most of us that are consumers of technologies and frameworks, treating the framework as an extension…
> it requires devoting time and effort towards its upkeep, and that is not our core business, nor should it be.
I would try to argue that this in fact may be subjective.
For me, updating all the dependencies in my stack every morning is a productivity routine that gets me started. If I spend a 30 minutes studying changelog of a dependency and linked github issues, I don't see that time as wasted even though it often does not contribute to the business. I think it has three benefits.
- easy morning start routine to get going
- developer education, expanding horizons
- code climate; having warn feeling in the gut of not falling behind, wanting to avoid dirty plugs and monkey patches, ability to work on the HEAD, should an issue arise.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#26This make so much sense, I think every company should update deps frequently and Dependabot and other services like that can help with that. It probably would be too costly to attempt what GH is doing for smaller orgs.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#27We are also running on Rails - and loving it, too. However, incorporating this methodology into our workflow would be both a lot of work to set up and also a lot of work to keep running. There certainly is a size threshold under which this is clearly an overkill and we are under that threshold. Yet, if this could be turned into a product, a clean integration, a command I need to run... would definitely use it (and pa…
I've been similar discussions with our security guy and a few of our build infrastructure guy, and yeah.
I think the pattern to consider is: (i) Yes, this would improve our deployment speed/upgrade speed/security posture, possibly by a huge amount. (ii) We have much bigger problems with higher impact.
Like, at work, we could spend a month or so to setup something like dependabot for our private stuff and I'm pretty sure we could get to a point of deploying these dependency updates quickly - or, for less critical systems, automatically even. And it would be cool.
But that won't help us with some of the flagship products in the company that have C++ dependencies on EOL windows components and no automated deployments. We'd rather have the capable guys working on these nasty issues, since these upgrades for the modern products can usually be done by a junior dev in a few days for all of these smaller and well-controlled systems.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#28Good post and an interesting glimpse into the behind-the-scenes efforts that goes into maintaining Github. I cannot agree with the "Should I do it too?" section. It probably works very well for an org as large and dedicated as Github, it very likely makes a lot of sense for what they do at the scale they do it at. For most of us that are consumers of technologies and frameworks, treating the framework as an extension…
> For most of us that are consumers of technologies and frameworks, treating the framework as an extension of an application stack, as the blog has outlined, is a terrible idea
My team currently does something similar albeit with a smaller framework (we are also much smaller than GH!), and it has done wonders for the stability of our flagship app. Imo it's only a terrible idea if your company does not want you to do it.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#29I absolutely love Rails. I'll always remember back in 2010 catching the train to Waterloo station in London and seeing a huge sign overlooking the train tracks that read something like "We Need Rails Developers". Rails was such a huge part of my professional career. Now, 13 years later and I'm deep in the JavaScript ecosystem and have been for 8 years. The most exciting thing to come out of this ecosystem recently is…
Have a look at AdonisJS. It's in a somewhat weird spot: On the one hand it is mature and has amazing DX/UX going for it, with a lot of very thoughtful tooling. On the other, for some reason, it has always remained niche with just a couple of core developers, even though it's now nearing version 6 and at least 8 years of releases. I do not know why that is the case. It's a beautifully written full stack framework, tak…
I used AdonisJS. Reminds me a lot of rails but with the added safety of typescript.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#30GitHub running off the main branch is fascinating, and initially sounds mad, but makes so much sense. Assuming they have very high test coverage, running against mainline Rails isn't really any different to having the fork they had before, but they have more influence on future development. It must also be a massive boon for the Rails ecosystem to have such a large property running off the head. Doesn't anyone know o…
Exactly, it’s an investment in Rails by tying yourself so closely with it.
Contrast to the JS ecosystem where as soon as there’s a disagreement or new idea a new framework is born