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RailsConf 2019 - From 0.10 to 5.2. The story of a 13 year old Rails app by Braulio Carreno
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Small-dollar donations were critical in the last election. The first version of the software that powers ActBlue, the main player in the space, was written in Rails 0.10.

During 13 years, 30K organizations have used the platform to raise $3 billion.

Some lessons we'll be sharing on this presentation: how to scale a monolith to process 1.5M RPM and 250 payments/sec, how to be productive with a 110K line code base, how to minimize the pain of Ruby/Rails upgrades and technical debt.

Intended for beginner to intermediate developers, managers, and anyone interested in building a lasting system.

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The video titled "From 0.10 to 5.2. The story of a 13 year old Rails app" by Braulio Carreno presents the evolution of ActBlue, a nonprofit platform that facilitates small-dollar donations for political campaigns and nonprofit organizations. Since its founding in 2004, ActBlue has raised over $3 billion for 30,000 organizations, demonstrating the power of grassroots funding.

In this presentation, Carreno shares important insights from their experience over 13 years with the platform, particularly focusing on how they scaled their monolithic Ruby on Rails application to handle significant traffic spikes and maintain reliability while managing a large codebase.

Key points discussed include:  
- **Technical Debt Management**: Carreno emphasizes treating technical debt as a feature rather than ignoring it, allowing teams to prioritize improvements alongside new features. Clear identification and prioritization are critical to effectively managing technical debt over time.
- **Obsolescence and Upgrading**: He notes that software obsolescence, such as outdated versions of Rails or gems, can introduce vulnerabilities. The strategy to handle this includes maintaining a solid test suite and carefully following the Rails upgrade guides to avoid skipping important minor versions and to address deprecation warnings.
- **Scaling a Growing Application**: Carreno discusses challenges faced due to the increasing size of the codebase, emphasizing the significance of well-structured code, good commit messages, and comprehensive documentation in maintaining code clarity, especially as team size grows.
- **Handling Traffic Spikes**: He illustrates how ActBlue managed high-traffic events, such as during debates or elections, by preparing infrastructure in advance and utilizing asynchronous job processing, caching, and load balancing to ensure contribution processing without significant downtime.
- **Choosing the Right Tools**: Carreno explains how the team opted to separate complex forms into different applications using frameworks like React to handle JavaScript more efficiently, while the main application handled core functionalities.

The high volume of contributions during significant events illustrates the urgency and importance of robust software design, enabling the infrastructure to handle sudden spikes in traffic. Carreno concludes that leveraging the right frameworks and investing in well-designed architecture is essential for long-term software success and adaptability.

Overall, the session is rich with practical lessons for developers and managers interested in building resilient long-running systems that can evolve with changing requirements and increased operational demand.

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