Shopify and Rails have grown up together. Both were in their infancy in 2004, and our CEO (Tobi) was one of the first contributors and a member of Rails Core. Shopify was built on top of Rails, and our engineering culture is rooted in the Rails Doctrine, from developer happiness to the omakase menu, sharp knives, and majestic monoliths. We embody the doctrine pillars. Shopify's success is due, in part, to Ruby and Rails. We feel obligated to pay that success back to the community as best we can. But our commitment and investment are about more than just paying off that debt; we have a more meaningful and mutually beneficial goal. One Hundred Year Mission At Shopify, we often talk about aspiring to be a 100-year company–to still be around in 2122! That feels like an ambitious dream, but we make decisions and build our code so that it scales as we grow with that goal in mind. If we pull that off, will Ruby and Rails still be our tech stack? It's hard to answer, but it's part of my job to think about that tech stack over the next 100 years. Ruby and Rails as 100-year tools? What does that even mean? To get to 100 years, Rails has to be more than an easy way to get started on a new project. It's about cost-effective performance in production, well-formed opinions on the application architecture, easy upgrades, great editors, avoiding antipatterns, and choosing when you want the benefits of typing. To get to 100 years, Ruby and Rails have to merit being the tool of choice, every day, for large teams and well-aged projects for a hundred years. They have to be the tool of choice for thousands of developers, across millions of lines of code, handling billions of web requests. That's the vision. That's Rails at scale. And that scale is where Shopify is investing. Why Companies Should Invest In Open Source Open source is
