Websites that Run on Magic and Wizardry, aka Ruby on Rails

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As a novice programmer, being introduced to Ruby on Rails (Rails for short), a Ruby-based web application framework, brought me into a whole new world with seemingly limitless possibilities.

Created by David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails was brought to into this world with the goal of helping programmers become more productive, and happy. Rails places heavy emphasis "Convention over Configuration", meaning that programmers only have to specify and code out non-standard parts of a program.

With Rails, beginner programmers like myself to build large, complex applications. To demonstrate how large, we'll look at 10 tech giants that were built using Rails:



Connecting travellers with hosts looking to rent their house space to others, Airbnb has over 3 million listings in 190+ countries and provides services to over 200M people worldwide.


CrunchBase serves as the Wikipedia of startups, and is the ultimate go-to website to see which companies are investing the companies and projects changing the world.


Bloomberg is a financial media company providing financial software tools, such as analytics, trading platforms, and news from the world of international politics, tech, and more. Bloomberg drives more than 100 million users in traffic monthly.


No stranger to developers, GitHub is the most popular web-based hosting service for software development projects using GIT, and serves as a social network platform for programmers.


The online descendant of one of the oldest sources of information long in existence before the days of Google, and even the internet. YellowPages boasts more than 60 million visitors monthly and is ranked in the top 40 of U.S. Web domains.



Japan's largest recipe site allowing users to upload and share recipes with other users that is used by nearly half of all millennial females in Japan. COOKPAD boasts a total of 20 million users, and more than 1.5 million uploaded recipes.



With over 76 million monthly users and offering access to 125 million tracks, SoundCloud is an online platform for discovering, streaming, recording, and sharing music from emerging and major artists around the world. 12 hours of music are uploaded to Soundcloud every minute.




Connecting subscribers with local merchants by offering exclusive discounts and benefits from local merchants, Groupon serves more than 500 cities worldwide with 48.1 million active customers.


Regardless of whether it's a Unicorn valued at $30B or a small budding app made in 3 days by programmers with 6 weeks experience, no job is too big or too small for rails!

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