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Cristian Planas's presentation at the Ruby Community Conference took place on July 19, 2024, in Warsaw.

2000 Engineers, 2 millions lines of code: The history of a Rails monolith

Rails is the best framework for building your startup. But what happens when the startup becomes a leading business? How do companies that have Rails at the heart of its stack manage growth? How do you maintain a growing application for 15 years in a constantly changing environment? In this presentation Cristian Planas, Senior Staff Engineers at Zendesk, will share with you his and his collegues' 10 years of experience in a company that has succeeded by keeping Rails in its core. He will guide you through the life of a Rails-centered organization, that scaled from zero to hundreds of millions of users.

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In this presentation at the Ruby Warsaw Community Conference, Cristian Planas, a Senior Staff Engineer at Zendesk, discusses the evolution and maintenance of a Rails monolith over a span of 17 years. The session highlights the challenges and strategies involved in sustaining a large codebase while adapting to technological changes and scaling demands. Planas draws parallels between the tech community and cinema, using a reference to the film Gladiator 2 to illustrate that narratives within software development can sometimes be as dramatic and convoluted as those in movies.

**Key Points:**  
- **Rails and Monoliths:** Planas emphasizes the importance of Rails as the core of a successful startup and its viability over time, despite past doubts about monoliths.
- **Experience at Zendesk:** He shares insights from his 10 years at Zendesk, which scaled from a startup to a major player serving hundreds of millions of users, while maintaining Rails as the backbone of their architecture.
- **The Pendulum of Software Architecture:** Plans discuss the shifting opinions in the tech community, particularly the perspectives on monolithic versus microservices architectures, highlighting that neither approach is without its trade-offs.  
- **Evolution of Technologies:** He details Zendesk's journey from a monolith to experimenting with service-oriented architectures as the company grew and acquired other businesses, leading to a need for more modular solutions.
- **Frontend Development:** Planas recounts the “JavaScript Wars,” discussing Zendesk's adoption of multiple JavaScript frameworks and the eventual centralization on React due to its robustness and community support.
- **Adopting New Technologies:** He explains Zendesk's 'tech menu' for approving new technologies, reflecting the challenges of integrating diverse tech solutions into a large organization.
- **Scaling Databases:** Planas describes various database optimization techniques including sharding and archiving, which are essential for managing large datasets.
- **Testing and Code Management:** He stresses the significance of testing in maintaining quality amidst a vast codebase, citing Zendesk’s robust testing culture and challenges with flaky tests.
- **Rails Upgrades:** Planas shares experiences with Rails upgrades, stressing the importance of thorough testing to ensure smooth transitions between versions and calling attention to the technical debt associated with previous code practices.

**Conclusions and Takeaways:** Planas concludes that while performance issues are often visible, maintaining a well-organized engineering team is more crucial yet less perceptible. He encourages engineers to engage with the community, learn from historical practices, and not to rely solely on tradition when approaching new problems. This ongoing journey of adapting and evolving technologies at Zendesk exemplifies the empowerment drawn from accumulated knowledge in the engineering realm.

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