Why I Keep Choosing Rails (And You Should Too)

I just published a detailed piece over at Ruby Growth Labs about why business leaders should choose Ruby on Rails, and it got me thinking about my own journey with the framework.

After years of building applications across different stacks, I keep coming back to Rails. Not because it's trendy (it's definitely not), but because it consistently delivers what businesses actually need: working software, shipped fast, maintained easily.

The Proof Is in the Billion-Dollar Pudding

As I outlined in my Ruby Growth Labs article, the companies using Rails aren't small startups hoping to scale someday. They're Shopify ($67B market cap), GitHub (acquired for $7.5B), and Stripe ($95B valuation). These companies didn't succeed despite using Rails—they succeeded partly because of it.

The "Rails doesn't scale" argument died years ago, but somehow it's still making the rounds in 2025.

Here's what I find most compelling about Rails: I can build and maintain complex applications without needing a small army of specialists. While other teams are coordinating between frontend developers, backend developers, and DevOps engineers, I'm shipping features.

This isn't just about ego or being a solo developer. It's about efficiency and focus. Every additional person on a project introduces communication overhead. Rails minimizes that by giving one person (or a small team) everything they need.

Dan McKinley wrote about choosing boring technology, and Rails exemplifies this philosophy perfectly. It's mature, stable, and predictable. When I start a Rails project, I know exactly what I'm getting.

Compare that to the JavaScript ecosystem, where your build tools might be deprecated by the time you finish reading this sentence.

As I mentioned in my full piece at Ruby Growth Labs, Rails might not be the shiniest tool available, but it's the one that consistently delivers results. While others debate the merits of the latest framework, Rails developers are building businesses.

Sometimes the boring choice is the smart choice. In software development, it's often the only choice that makes business sense.