We know Rails – like, really well.

Experience tells us that by using Ruby on Rails, we can rapidly get your products to market, while maintaining a high standard of code quality.

How we’ve helped our clients

Adding value to billions of lines of code every day

Code Climate contacted us about collaborating on product development, and as longtime users of their service, we were excited to take the opportunity to work on their product.

See how we helped make your codebase better

The design is top notch and the devs who handle all the Rails work are fantastic. I like that you can even sit next to them in thoughtbot's office and answer questions on the fly as they code. It really increases the speed of development and the app is better for it.
Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting via Quora

An interactive WebGL Engine to teach martial arts

Martial Codex came to thoughtbot with the goal of preserving and documenting rare martial arts. The team cared deeply about their practices and wanted them to be captured in time.

See how we helped preserve multiple forms of martial arts

An e‑commerce platform for Scandinavia's largest manufacturer of coffins

Nyarp contacted us for a complete re-design of their e-commerce infrastructure. This was a unique opportunity for thoughtbot to help build a well-functioning set of sites with end users in mind, from the very bottom up.

See how we built a modern e‑commerce platform

In the Weeds

Why we love Rails

Batteries included

Rails was the first non-enterprise, opinionated, complete Web framework. It had built-in pluralization of nouns! Database migrations! Distinct runtime environments! A huge bag of helper methods that abstracts common tasks and makes code read beautifully. Mere minutes to spin up a server and deploy to Heroku, for free!

Active development

We still use Rails because it solves its specific problem the best, thanks to the years of development over other systems. Django is the closest competitor, but it has historically lacked the people-power that the Rails ecosystem had. For secure, stable, boring, simple CRUD: Rails. For most of the Web: Rails.

A wonderful community

Once we got into Rails it became clear that there was a great open source community around Ruby and Rails which made doing new or even scary things a lot simpler. There were great learning resources like RailsCasts, Destroy All Software, and the thoughtbot blog. It was just a good community to fall into.

When Rails isn't a good choice

Go or Elixir/Phoenix make more sense for The Non-Web Internet: chat, email, SSH, Redis sockets, command-line API tools, custom network servers, anything synchronous. Anything that scales vertically, or has a significant amount of traffic (>10kRPM), should probably not be done in Rails.

Explore our Ruby On Rails gems

Most applications have a lot of similar functionality that is not key to the business. We reduce time and costs by using pre-built libraries and tools that are wrapped up in "Gems". We also create and maintain our own gems to make this process even more efficient.

Paperclip

An easy file attachment library for Active Record.

GitHub
Clearance

Rails authentication with email & password.

GitHub
High Voltage

Easily include static pages in your Rails app.

GitHub
Suspenders

A Rails template with our standard defaults, ready to deploy to Heroku.

GitHub
Factory Bot

A library for setting up Ruby objects as test data.

GitHub