Talks & presentations.

Rails Engines Are the Best-Kept Secret

(And You're Using Them Wrong)

Rails engines are the most powerful architectural tool Rails gives you. After 5+ years building engines in production (including the 440+ star Active Storage Dashboard), I've learned that engines aren't just gems with views. They're the missing piece between monolith that's getting painful and let's rewrite everything as microservices. In this talk, I want to share the patterns that work, the mistakes that will ruin your week, and my zero-dependency philosophy that keeps engines maintainable for years. I'll also introduce ActiveCanvas a new open-source Rails engine that is a CMS/builder where marketing views can be dynamically changed by the marketing team without requiring too much html knowledge and without redeploy every time. Hot take: You don't need microservices. You don't need a team of ten. You need engines.

Building a Rails Engine from Scratch

Lessons from Active Storage Dashboard and more

A deep dive into building Rails engines, sharing practical lessons learned from developing Active Storage Dashboard and other open source projects.