Tom Rossi: Staying as Rails as Possible

Tom Rossi, co-founder of Higher Pixels and the team behind Buzzsprout, joins Robby to talk about what it really looks like to stay "as Rails as possible", purely out of pragmatism. With over 472,000 podcasts on the platform and a team of fewer than ten people, Tom explains how sticking to vanilla Rails has been the foundation of Buzzsprout's ability to move fast, stay lean, and keep up with a rapidly evolving industry.

In this episode, Tom walks through Buzzsprout's migration from Paperclip to Active Storage (including what broke spectacularly in production), their recent shift from hand-rolled summary tables to ClickHouse for analytics, and how Hotwire made building the Buzzsprout mobile app surprisingly manageable. He also shares how Buzzsprout's real-world scale, including the monkey patching that resulted from it, led directly to contributions back upstream into Rails itself.

• Higher Pixels: https://www.higherpixels.com
• Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com
• Buzzsprout Blog: https://www.buzzsprout.com/blog
• Tick (time tracking): https://www.tickspot.com
• Donor Tools: https://www.donortools.com
• StreamCare: https://www.streamcare.com
• Higher Pixels joins the Rails Foundation: https://rubyonrails.org/2025/2/18/higher-pixels-joins-foundation

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On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.

On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.