We had a great chat with Jessie Keck, an Engineering Manager at Ontra, a legal technology company, at the Rails Conf. Entre is focused on contract automation, using AI and machine learning to help attorneys work more efficiently. When asked about why they chose Rails, Jesse mentioned that the founders had found success in the Rails community previously and had similar values when it came to development. They have recently made a commitment to using Rails for all new projects, with the backend being Rails and the front-end moving towards React.
Jesse also talked about the challenges of having a monolithic codebase and how his team has been using Packwerk to modularize the application into packs to define boundaries. He also talked about the lack of uniformity around service classes in Rails and how they are exploring gems to solve this.
Jesse gave a shoutout to the cancan gem, an authorization library they have previously sponsored, and two people he admires in the community, Nate Berkopec and Justin Searls. He also mentioned Blacklight, a Ruby on Rails gem that allows you to build search engines on top of Lucene/Solr.
It was great to hear from Jessie and learn about his experience with Rails and the challenges he has faced. It's always inspiring to see how companies are using technology to make a difference in the legal industry.
