Nikky Southerland: Lessons from 13 Years of Rails at the Auto Shop

**Robby Russell** (0:05)
Welcome to On Rails, the podcast where we dig into the technical decisions behind building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails apps. I'm your host, Robby Russell. I also run Planet Argon, and for over 20 years, we've helped teams maintain and evolve their long lived Rails apps. So I tend to approach these conversations through that lens. On this episode, I'm joined by Nikky Southerland, lead engineer at Shop-Ware, which is part of Velo. Shop-Ware is a software platform that helps automated service shops run their businesses. Behind the scenes, Ruby on Rails has played a major role in powering that platform, and it's grown and evolved over the years. In our conversation, Nikky and I dig into how the Rails app has evolved. Over that time, how their team approaches API design and front-end architecture decisions that have accumulated over the years, and what it looks like to continue maintaining and improving a mature Rails system with a much smaller team than they once had.
Nikky joins us from Philadelphia in the United States. All right, check for your belongings. All aboard.
Nikky Southerland, welcome to On Rails.

**Nikky Southerland** (1:03)
Thanks, Robby. Happy to be here.

**Robby Russell** (1:05)
All right, Nikky. So to kick things off, what keeps you on Rails these days?

**Nikky Southerland** (1:10)
Oh, it's pure love. I've been on Rails for 12, 13 years now, and every time I drive away, I always come right back because nothing else makes me feel the warm embrace of something I think I truly care for and a framework that really makes sense for what I'm trying to do.

**Robby Russell** (1:26)
Out of curiosity, what tech stacks did you work with prior to Ruby On Rails?

**Nikky Southerland** (1:30)
Well, I got started working on Perl forums back in the 2000s.

**Robby Russell** (1:36)
Okay.

**Nikky Southerland** (1:37)
And that was real fun. And then a lot of WordPress experience after that, and you know, so PHP as well. But that's kind of the general progression.

**Robby Russell** (1:45)
Is that back in like the Perl CGI script era or?

**Nikky Southerland** (1:50)
Yep, CGI been directory and it was a forum software that like probably like three people used and did not work very well, but it was great at the time.

**Robby Russell** (1:57)
Oh, brings back memories myself as well. I did quite a bit of work in Perl actually in the early 2000s, a couple years before I started using Ruby On Rails myself. Did you find it interesting like similarities between Perl and Ruby at the time?

**Nikky Southerland** (2:08)
Not really. I did appreciate, you know, the fact that Rails had an actual ORM, whereas our Perl database was actually a flat text file. They don't believe an actual database is this particular piece of software, so that was fun. But I do find the other languages that I think Perl has a bad rap, but I disagree. I think it's really friendly for what it's trying to do, and I think it's designed with a lot of thought and intent, which is what I really appreciate about it.
Nice.

**Robby Russell** (2:33)
All right. So why I wanted to have you on the podcast is like, so for listeners who might not be familiar with Shop-Ware, can you give us a little bit of an overview of the platform and how Ruby On Rails fits into the architecture today?

**Nikky Southerland** (2:44)
Yeah, sure. So we've been around for a little over a decade now. I think we got started like 2013
And it was Rails app from the very beginning. Rails, probably version 3 at the time, as a company and a group has grown, Rails is growing along with us. It really helped us kind of meet the challenges that a growing platform needs and provides the guardrails and recommendations to do things kind of the Rails way, which is the way that we wanted to do them initially.

**Robby Russell** (3:11)
What is Shop-Ware actually?

**Nikky Southerland** (3:13)
You know, there's lots of things in the world that you don't really know about. And I think this is software for auto shops. There's mechanics every day who are working on your car and you bring it in and you have some sort of issues. And you have a service advisor who inspects your car and tells you how much money you need to pay to get your vehicle operating safely. Again, it's always more than you'd probably like. But, you know, this is software that helps keep track of that job. You know, you can prove your estimates and then it gets handed off to the technician who then actually does the work and tracks their labor hours. And it's kind of an all-in-one platform to help an auto, an auto shop business kind of run their shop, which is, you know, a lot of like insider industry stuff that we don't think about, but they care a lot about it. And we try to help them imagine enthusiasm.