A few months ago, I was invited to join the On Rails podcast to talk about how we’ve managed our Ruby on Rails monolith at Gusto. Generally speaking, Rails is designed to reduce any barrier to a business becoming among the 1% of startups to succeed – to get “into orbit” as DHH says – which in turn provides some really big and interesting challenges for the 1% that do.

Gusto is undeniably among that 1%, so many of our biggest problems are effectively niche problems. All the “sharp knives” that Rails provides end up stabbing us now that we serve hundreds of thousands of customers and have over 600 engineers working on two enormously complex applications (we jokingly called this a “bi-lith”, and somehow an “o” awkwardly made its way in there).

The episode dropped while I was traveling, so I’m only now posting. It was a lot of fun talking about our problems and some of the ways we’ve solved them.

Special thanks to Robby Russel, who was a pleasure to chat with!

Miguel Conde & Peter Compernolle: Inside Gusto’s Rails Biolith