A Tale at Any Scale - Lessons from 14 Years of Rails Development

Explore the evolution and management of large-scale Rails codebases in this 29-minute conference talk from XO Ruby Chicago 2025. Discover what distinguishes a 5-year-old Rails application from one that has been continuously developed for over 14 years, examining patterns that emerge in codebases with over a million commits and more than a decade of evolution. Learn practical lessons from working within massive, legacy Rails systems and understand which development practices prove sustainable as both teams and codebases scale. Gain insights into what works and what fails as projects grow, identify best practices that withstand the test of time, and recognize common traits shared between massive enterprise systems and smaller projects. Whether you're maintaining a startup application or contributing to an established legacy system, acquire actionable strategies you can immediately apply to improve your development workflow and codebase management approach.