---
title: 'New Online Workshop: How to Supercharge Your Rails App with a Code Audit'
teaser: 'Learn thoughtbot''s approach and process around conducting code audits on
  Rails apps for our clients.

  '
tags: workshops,code audit,rails
author: Josh Clayton
published_on: 2020-03-30
---

I've worked on enough Rails applications and talked to enough developers and
technical leaders to know that virtually every Rails app, no matter how
well-maintained, can become troublesome to work on. There are a number of
factors to this: features can be built in a number of different ways, business
and customer needs evolve over time, or the team shifts and context is lost.

We've been conducting code audits for clients for a number of years now in an
effort to uncover pain points, name them, and work to prioritize tackling
identified solutions to help speed up feature development and improve developer
happiness (because who doesn't enjoy working on a cohesive, well-factored,
performant Rails application?) From those audits, we've honed in on our process
and tooling to ensure we're uncovering the riskiest portions of the codebase.

[![Joël and Alejandro pair-programming and smiling while looking at the same
computer
screen](https://images.thoughtbot.com/blog-vellum-image-uploads/0AXhkltzTDSwDMP6p0uE_code-audit-workshop-final.png)](https://info.thoughtbot.com/code-audit-workshop)

With [our purpose](https://thoughtbot.com/purpose) in mind, we are hosting an
online workshop geared towards engineering leaders of teams working in Rails
applications, covering:

* how to prepare for a code audit, including instrumentation and SaaS solutions
  to begin capturing insights
* key areas of focus when auditing Rails applications, like test suite time,
  code churn, and SQL performance
* audit tooling, like [reek](https://github.com/troessner/reek) and
  [churn](https://github.com/danmayer/churn)
* prioritizing audit findings

I'll be hosting the workshop and joined by two additional thoughtbot
developers, Joël Quenneville and Annie Lydens.

[Join us on April 9th at 12:30pm
ET](https://info.thoughtbot.com/code-audit-workshop) – we hope to see you
there!