

How Agility Allows Us to Build One Of the World's Biggest Rails Apps - mickeyben
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/ford-large-rails;jsessionid=AB8C0DA109E2B6C9976F9A292E2E4FFF

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audionerd
Here's this talk as a PDF:

[http://github.com/nealford/presentations/blob/master/Rails%2...](http://github.com/nealford/presentations/blob/master/Rails%20in%20the%20Large-
Building%20the%20Biggest%20Rails%20App%20%28Neal%20Ford%20and%20Paul%20Gross%29.pdf)

... from this collection of Neal Ford's presentation slides on github:

<http://github.com/nealford/presentations>

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tptacek
32k lines of code is one of the world's biggest Rails apps?

We clock in over double that, and still beat that number _without_ counting
auto-generated code (Ragel and Racc output), _without_ counting views and
templates, and _without_ counting tests.

(We are, for the record, not proud of this number. "How did agility allow us
to scale to such heights? Well, whenever we run into a problem, we fling more
f'ing code at it, like a monkey with a handful of poop.")

There is no way either of these two apps --- ours or theirs --- can really be
among the largest Rails codebases.

~~~
patio11
For comparison, rake stats reports BCC is about 6k these days -- not counting
the Java client application.

When they reported 30kloc in the app the Enterprise developer in me
immediately started thinking of "Where is the rest of the iceberg hiding?"

~~~
tptacek
On the one hand, you know what's really happening here. Most of the internal
enterprise Java apps we look at crush these Rails apps by LOC; intuitively,
even though Java inflates the LOC metric, it's no contest even by any
reasonable scale factor you'd assign. What's happening is that Rails nibbles
at the edges of the market and gets relatively small problems to work on. Apps
like ours are big --- _for Rails apps_. Not a hugely meaningful metric.

On the other hand: how many developers does Thoughtworks have on this project
again?

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JeremyChase
I wish this wasn't an hour long, or had a text Table of Contents. Can anyone
please give a breakdown of when are interesting spots in the video to watch?

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brown9-2
the InfoQ article is missing the "(Enterprise)" qualifier from the original
presentation's title.

