The Past, Present, and Future of Rails at GitHub
summary
GitHub documents how it pays down a decade of technical debt to move from Rails 3.2 forks onto modern Rails: an initial six‑month, four‑engineer push for 3.x, then a focused four‑person upgrade that moves Rails 4.2 → 5.2 in 5 months using dual‑booting via a Bundler monkeypatch to run multiple Rails versions, deploys with zero downtime, reduces a 4,000+ error build to green, and contributes 60+ upstream PRs while adopting weekly Rails gem bumps to avoid falling behind again.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:27I'm on the RAILS Core team!
- 3:05Upgrading CRAILS at GitHub
- 3:46The Past, Present, & Future of CRAILS at GitHub
- 5:50Frameworks are extracted, not built.
- 19:20The cost of not upgrading is immeasurable
- 24:43When upgrading you should...
- 25:34take time to make a plan.
- 26:21fix deprecation warnings early.
- 26:59add linters to prevent regressions.
- 27:18When upgrading you should plan for the future.
- 28:48falling behind security supported versions.
- 29:24using old, unsupported gems.
- 29:54using private Rails APIs.
- 30:24You may regret monkey patches.
- 31:46This was my first major upgrade.
- 32:18It's important to remember to pay debt down incrementally.
- 33:13It's important to remember the payoff is worth it.
- 33:30The benefits of upgrading
- 37:3760+ Pull Requests from GitHub
- 38:09Continuous Upgrades
- 39:03Rails 6.0: Multiple database support
- 39:27For the first time in GitHub's history...
- 40:06We have a responsibility to support Rails
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