On Rails
On Rails
Podcast Description
On Rails invites Rails developers to share real-world technical challenges and solutions, architectural decisions, and lessons learned while building with Rails. Through technical deep-dives and retrospectives with experienced engineers in the Rails community, we explore the strategies behind building and scaling Rails applications.Hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast covers topics such as architectural decisions, technical challenges, and lessons learned in Rails development. Examples of specific episodes include discussions on the transition from Resque to Solid Queue by 37signals, the best practices for handling recurring and long-running jobs, and insights into system design, reliability, and maintainability in Rails applications.
On Rails invites Rails developers to share real-world technical challenges and solutions, architectural decisions, and lessons learned while building with Rails. Through technical deep-dives and retrospectives with experienced engineers in the Rails community, we explore the strategies behind building and scaling Rails applications.
Hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon.
In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Kayla Reopelle, a lead software engineer at New Relic, where she works on both the Ruby Agent and OpenTelemetry RubyGems. They explore what observability means for Rails developers—not just as a debugging tool, but as a way to build clearer, more reliable systems. Kayla explains OpenTelemetry's vendor-agnostic approach to instrumentation and shares practical ways to experiment with traces, metrics, and logs in both production and local development.
GitHub: https://github.com/kaylareopelle
🧰 Tools & Libraries Mentioned
ActiveSupport::Notifications: Rails’ pub/sub API used for instrumentation.
AppSignal: Rails-friendly APM and error tracking.
AWS X-Ray: Distributed tracing for AWS services.
Datadog: Full-stack observability platform.
Elastics Profiling Spec: Donated profiling format for OpenTelemetry.
Grafana: Open-source dashboards and visualization.
Honeybadger : Error monitoring for Ruby apps.
Jaeger: Distributed tracing system (CNCF).
New Relic Ruby Agent: APM agent for Ruby and Rails.
ObservableGauge (OTel Metrics): Async gauge for snapshots like queue size.
OpenTelemetry Collector: Pipeline for receiving and exporting telemetry data.
OpenTelemetry Logger Bridge: Sends Ruby logger output to OTEL.
OpenTelemetry Ruby: Vendor-agnostic telemetry for Ruby.
OpenTelemetry Ruby SIG: Community group maintaining OTEL Ruby.
Prometheus: Metrics collection and storage.
Rack Middleware: Web middleware stack used in many Rails instrumentations.
Rails Structured Logging / Event Reporter: Structured logs built into Rails.
On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.
On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.
Disclaimer
This podcast’s information is provided for general reference and was obtained from publicly accessible sources. The Podcast Collaborative neither produces nor verifies the content, accuracy, or suitability of this podcast. Views and opinions belong solely to the podcast creators and guests.
For a complete disclaimer, please see our Full Disclaimer on the archive page. The Podcast Collaborative bears no responsibility for the podcast’s themes, language, or overall content. Listener discretion is advised. Read our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for more details.