Teaching Rails with the Real Thing: Onboarding Engineers into a (Massive) Monolith

At Procore, our Rails monolith is massive - among the largest in the world - and intimidating to newcomers. I designed and taught a course that helped over 900 engineers of varying skill levels stop fearing it by teaching Rails and our monolith at the same time. Rather than using generic tutorials, we grounded everything in the actual product they’d be working on - layering Rails fundamentals with the domain-specific knowledge they really needed. In this talk, I’ll share how learning science, product context, and deep app knowledge came together to make our course work—and how you can adapt it for your team.