Articles by Amanda Bizzinotto

In a previous post, AI Assistant for Our Blog Writing Process opens a new window , I introduced the assistant we built to help with our blog writing. At the core of that assistant is an MCP server, which serves as the source of truth for both of our blogs. It exposes that knowledge through tools the client can call and documentation the client can read.

Getting an MCP server running is the easy part. Every quickstart, in every language, gives you a server that runs as a subprocess on your own machine and disappears when the client exits. That’s enough to experiment locally, but it’s a long way from something a team can rely on. Once you want to deploy it, questions about where it runs, state management, authentication, and security become your responsibility. The Ruby SDK’s defaults don’t solve most of those problems, and one of them even comes with a published security advisory.

In this article, we’ll cover what changes when a Ruby MCP server stops being a subprocess: the two shapes it can take in a Rails shop, why session state breaks down when running behind multiple Puma workers, the DNS rebinding vulnerability the transport shipped with, and what the specification asks of you once a shared token is no longer enough.

The Roadmap to Upgrade Rails opens a new window is FastRuby.io’s discovery product that helps teams plan and execute their Rails upgrade projects.

We’re happy to introduce an Automated Version of the Roadmap, powered by an AI agent, available completely for free!

Check it out on the Automated Roadmap to Upgrade Rails opens a new window page and keep reading to learn more about how it works.

At FastRuby.io, we spend our days deep in Rails codebases, upgrading, refactoring, and occasionally wondering, “Wait… is this method from Ruby or Rails?”.

Now, we’re turning that moment of confusion into a game. We’re excited to introduce Is It Ruby or Rails?, a brand new Discord bot that delivers daily puzzles to challenge your Ruby knowledge and fuel a little friendly competition.

You can install it using the Discord install link opens a new window and start playing right away!

At FastRuby.io opens a new window , we offer specialized Rails upgrade, maintenance, and technical debt services.

Before doing an upgrade, we strongly recommend doing the Roadmap to Upgrade Rails opens a new window , a static analysis of your codebase that outlines the action plan to do the upgrade and provides time and investment estimates.

The first step in every Rails upgrade we do is addressing deprecation warnings in the current version. So recently, we set out to extract all deprecation warnings from all versions of Rails starting at Rails 2.3 to help in our static analysis of Rails applications.

In the first article of this series, we discussed How Much Does It Cost to Upgrade Rails opens a new window based on our historical data working on over 100 upgrade projects. In this article we’ll discuss how to minimize the cost once you’ve decided to move forward on an upgrade so your team can continue to focus on valuable product feature or roadmap work.

Working with our team of experts to upgrade your Rails application allows you to stay compliant and take advantage of the benefits and security updates of a supported version, while also letting your team focus on revenue-generating initiatives. Still, it can be a significant investment, especially, as we covered in the previous post, if your project requires a high level of manual QA, for example.

There are, however, ways to reduce the time (and therefore cost) it takes to upgrade your Rails application when working with an external team. In this article, we’ll cover a few different strategies. Does it mean you can’t upgrade unless you do all of this? No, it doesn’t. Being an Agile team allows us to adapt to your process and workflow and work with any team to get the upgrade done. However, employing at least one of these strategies can make your upgrade more cost-effective.

You’ve decided you need to prioritize upgrading Rails. Maybe it’s a compliance issue, you’re running a version that has reached EOL and need to upgrade to a more current one. Maybe you want to benefit from some of the new features more recent versions provide. Maybe you’ve noticed the old Rails version is getting in the way of your team’s productivity. Or maybe it’s something else.

Whatever the motivation may be, upgrading Rails can be a significant effort. As such, one of the key things to consider is how expensive will it be to get you from your current version to your target version. Regardless of whether you plan to handle the upgrade in house or outsource, how long it’ll take and, therefore, how much it’ll cost, are the key questions to answer.

We have invested more than 30,000 hours in total in upgrading Rails applications, having completed more than 100 upgrade projects. In this article, we’ll leverage our historical data and what we learned to help you answer this question: How much will this cost?

We recently collaborated with Procore opens a new window on a Rails upgrade opens a new window for their Rails application which allows teams in the construction industry to connect their entire business process.

We spoke with Andy Maltun, Procore’s VP of Software Engineering, about the work performed to help them upgrade their app to version 5.1. According to Maltun, Procore’s R&D department is large and complex. While Procore opens a new window previously had handled their Rails upgrades internally, with so many teams working on the application, it caused a lot of disruption as each team would handle only part of the upgrade. Therefore, Maltun “wanted to take a different approach this time in an effort to centralize the update and minimize the project management overhead and disruption of teams.”

Technology evolves quickly. When you first created your Rails application, it’s likely you did it using the latest version of Rails opens a new window . As time passes, however, new Rails opens a new window versions come out and your application becomes more and more out of touch with the latest version. But why is this important? Why does it matter?

There are several different reasons to upgrade your Rails application opens a new window . In this article, I’ll list what we consider to be the most important ones.

We recently collaborated with Amitree opens a new window on a Rails upgrade opens a new window for their application which “is an AI assistant for email, integrated deeply within Google and Microsoft’s products and is in heavy use by real estate professionals” and were able to speak to them about their experience with OmbuLabs opens a new window .