Rails 7.0 released a non-event atDoctolib

Last Wednesday came the release announcement of Rails 7.0.

You may have already heard that Rails 7 eliminates the need for NodeJs and Webpack today. Just to save the time spent, during development, waiting for the transpilation of JavaScript codes, this is a huge gift.

Security obsessives will retain native encryption of ActiveRecord attributes. This is one more way to bring security to the confidentiality of the data which is so dear to us.

For many, one would have said that Santa Claus was passing by 10 days in advance.
But not at Doctolib.

What?! Wouldn't Santa Claus come to Docto? But yes, don't worry it had in fact already happened since November 4th.

Because, what is less highlighted in the general public announcements, it is that Rails 7 brings the support of requests on associations through multiple databases ("cross cluster") thanks in particular to a Github's contribution.

So don't repeat it to the children, but sometimes you have to help this Santa Claus a little, and with us he received the help of the Engineering team which is precisely interested in the split of our database.

Yes, yes, you read that correctly: We had been serving your favorite application in production for over a month on an alpha version of Rails 7 just like Shopify or Github did.
And at the rate of 3 rollouts per day, I will even tell you that Rails 7 is an old history for us An history on which more than 4000 commits have already been stacked.
As a matter of history, I must even admit that, as a newcomer to the house, I was surprised at the non-event that it was! A quick announcement on Slack one morning, and at noon, quietly, we were running on Rails 7.

But was it really useful to take the risk of running on an alpha version?

It's FUN and BOLD and it's no small feat. And it's also an opportunity to make our contribution to the open source world by enabling mine clearance that benefits the entire Rails community.
But it is also a pragmatic choice that allowed us to follow our plan for structuring our database architecture. Because the multi-database split is a hot topic on which we are working a lot.

Thus ends our last Advent ticket, all we have to do is join our families to await the arrival of Santa Claus. Merry Christmas to everyone.

Header photo credits : TrainDoubs-25