Rails Engines Are the Best-Kept Secret
(And You're Using Them Wrong)
Rails engines are the missing piece between a painful monolith and microservices. Patterns that work, mistakes that hurt, and a zero-dependency philosophy.
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 a monolith that’s getting painful and “let’s rewrite everything as microservices”.
In this talk I share the patterns that work, the mistakes that will ruin your week, and the zero-dependency philosophy that keeps engines maintainable for years. I also introduce ActiveCanvas, a new open-source Rails engine: a CMS/builder where marketing views can be changed by the marketing team without deep HTML knowledge and without a redeploy every time.
Hot take: you don’t need microservices. You don’t need a team of ten. You need engines.