In 2004, Shopify’s CEO and founder, Tobi Lütke, was building out an e-commerce store for snowboarding products. Unsatisfied with the existing e-commerce products on the market, Tobi decided to build his own SaaS platform using Ruby on Rails.
At that time, Rails wasn't even 1.0 yet, and the only version of the framework was exchanged as a .zip archive by email. Tobi joined Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and started contributing to Ruby on Rails while building Shopify.
Shopify is now one of the world's largest and oldest Rails apps. It’s never been rewritten and still uses the original codebase, though it has matured considerably over the past decade. All of Tobi’s original commits are still in the version control history.
The bet on Rails greatly shaped how we think at Shopify and empowered us to deliver product as fast as possible. While there are parts of the framework that sometimes make it harder to scale (e.g. ActiveRecord callbacks and code organization), many of us tend to agree with Tobi that Rails is what allowed Shopify to move from a garage startup to a public company.
