The Past, Present and Future of Rails at GitHub

on YouTube ↗38m

" summary

GitHub spends seven years paying down a decade of technical debt after maintaining a custom Rails fork, moving from Rails 3-era code to Rails 5.2 and deploying 4.2 (March 2018) and 5.2 (August 2018) to production with zero downtime. Upgrades use a dual‑booting CI to run tests against multiple Rails versions, a dedicated team (four full‑time engineers for five months on 5.x) to triage ~2,500 test failures, and weekly continuous upgrades that surface regressions; result: 75+ upstream PRs, extracted features (multiple DBs), and fewer security and dependency burdens.

AI-written summary · about

" chapters (8)

1. 0:00Introduction and background
2. 2:27Rails at GitHub past
3. 10:03Costs of not upgrading Rails
4. 15:38Upgrading to Rails master
5. 22:00Tips for upgrading Rails
6. 27:37You can do the upgrade
7. 33:15Contributing upstream benefits
8. 36:06Future of Rails at GitHub

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