RR 371: The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture with Dan Manges

Listen to the full episode here::

Panel:

David Richards
Dave Kimura
Catherine Meyers

Special Guests: Dan Manges

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Dan Manges about his blog post entitled The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture. Dan is the CTO of Root, which is a car insurance carrier in Columbus, Ohio. They started the company a few years ago because they felt that the prices people pay for car insurance should be based primarily on diving behavior and not demographics. They talk about how he built the architecture of the app for his company, what a Modular Monolith is, their different gems, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Dan intro
CTO and Co-Founder of Root
Tracking driving habits of users to determine rate
Ruby on Rails
Architecture of the app
Back-end platform in Rails
Mobile as the primary interface
See the app in the Google Play and iTunes stores
Current direction for the company
Identify good architectural boundaries in the code base
Monoliths
What is Modular Monolith?
Why did you decide not to go the microservices route?
Microservices introduce tradeoffs in your efficiency of making changes
Not having a too fragmented back-end platform
Do you have one large schema?
Maintaining productivity
Engines
Separate integration tests
Integration tests between various components
Their rating engine
Deployments
His article: The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture
Highly recommends their modular monolith
Everything is in one codebase
And much, much more!

Links:

The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture
Root
Ruby on Rails
Root in the Google Play store
Root in iTunes
@dan_manges
Dan’s Medium
Dan’s GitHub

Sponsors

Sentry
Digital Ocean
FreshBooks

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David

Pay attention to how you’re hiring
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Catherine

Breaking Into Startups Podcast

Dan

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