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In this closing keynote titled "The Past, Present, and Future of Rails at GitHub," Eileen M. Uchitelle, a staff engineer at GitHub, shares insights into the journey of upgrading Rails at the company and reflects on the implications of technical debt in application development. She begins by expressing gratitude to the conference organizers and humorously setting expectations for the talk, emphasizing the importance of communication.

The presentation covers the following key points:

- **History of Rails and GitHub's Fork**:  Eileen explains how GitHub started using Rails from day one, eventually forking it and creating a custom version due to performance concerns and feature differences, which led them to deviate significantly from the main Rails framework.
- **Consequences of Forking**: Over the years, the decision to fork Rails created numerous challenges including slow upgrades, technical debt accumulation, and complicated hiring processes, as developers were hesitant to work on such an outdated version.
- **The Upgrade Journey**: After years of stalling, a dedicated team was formed in 2014 to address the backlog of upgrades. Eileen details the systematic approach taken to upgrade from Rails 3.2 to 5.2, including lessons learned like dual booting the application to allow for gradual testing and integration of new versions without downtime.
- **Importance of Continuous Upgrading**: Uchitelle highlights the necessity of keeping applications up-to-date to prevent the pitfalls of technical debt, emphasizing that failing to upgrade can lead to profound security vulnerabilities and diminishing capacity for onboarding new engineers.
- **Investment in the Future of Rails**: Post-upgrade, GitHub engineers are now actively contributing to the Rails codebase, underlining their commitment to not just utilizing Rails but also shaping its future. Eileen stresses the importance of supporting the open-source community that underpins much of GitHub's success.

The talk concludes on a hopeful note, encouraging audience members to embrace the challenges of upgrading, noting that incremental progress toward eliminating technical debt will yield long-term benefits. Eileen reassures that with the right approach, organizations can elevate their frameworks and applications, thus enhancing overall efficiency and security.

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