Best of Rails — June 2025

1. 1
   Article

   ByteByteGo·50w

   Shopify Tech Stack

   Shopify processes massive scale with 173 billion requests on Black Friday using a tech stack built on Ruby on Rails, React, MySQL, and Kafka. The platform uses a modular monolith architecture with strict component boundaries, database sharding through isolated pods, and extensive tooling investments including YJIT compiler and Sorbet type checker. The infrastructure handles 284 million requests per minute at peak, 66 million Kafka messages per second, and processes 216 million ML embeddings daily for semantic search, all while maintaining developer productivity through comprehensive CI/CD pipelines and observability tools.

   385

   9
2. 2
   Article

   RUBYLAND·49w

   Thoughts on Freelancing for Web Developers

   Experienced web developers should target agencies and mid-sized businesses instead of small local shops or platforms like Upwork for freelance work. Agencies are better clients because they understand how to work with developers, have ongoing projects, established processes, and budgets for quality work. They offer repeat business and referrals, making freelancing more sustainable. The key is finding clients who already know how to work with developers and have long-term needs, focusing on building reliable relationships rather than competing on crowded platforms.

   42

   6
3. 3
   Video

   bigboxSWE·50w

   Programming Trends We Forgot

   A retrospective look at programming technologies that were once popular but have fallen out of favor, including Ruby on Rails, microservices, jQuery, Flash, Java applets, LAMP stack, CoffeeScript, GraphQL, and various development practices. The piece explores why these technologies lost their hype despite many still being functional and useful, often due to newer alternatives, changing developer preferences, or the rapid pace of technological evolution in software development.

   14

   7