The new year is always a great time for reflection, so we thought we’d share some metrics about the Fullscript platform & engineering team to kick off 2024!

In 2023, Fullscript helped more people get better than ever by shipping new features at a record pace. Our engineering culture focuses on ownership, community, collaboration, and technical quality. We empower our developers to build great software leveraging automated testing, continuous delivery, application monitoring, and exceptional developer tooling. The decision to commit to this culture has continued to pay dividends in 2023.

Rails Scales

The Fullscript application is a large Ruby on Rails monolith (760,000+ lines of Ruby!), a React frontend, and a GraphQL API that connects the two. Monoliths are often criticized for being slow to develop and unscalable, but we couldn’t disagree more. In early 2023, we served an average of 6.5 million requests per day. By the end of the year, we averaged 10 million requests per day. We scale horizontally based on request duration, so despite this 54% increase in traffic, our average request latency remained at 130ms. And we still have plenty of headroom to continue scaling. Behind the scenes, we processed 1.5 billion background jobs — everything from sending emails to search indexing.

We’re big fans of Ruby on Rails, and believe it’s still one of the best ways to build web applications. In 2023 we sponsored RubyConf, the Ruby Weekly Newsletter, Blaxpo, PrideHacks, the Women in Tech Global Conference and helped revive the local Ottawa Ruby meetup. We’re excited to continue to give back to the community in 2024.

Shipping Code

We have always been big believers in continuous delivery and have built robust CI/CD pipelines enabling us to ship high-quality code safely. We deployed our core web app 3,624 times last year, an average of 14.5 deployments per day while maintaining 99.999% uptime. This is over 1000 more deploys than in 2022. This main deployment pipeline runs 135 unique jobs — running our complete test suites (over 5000 combined), automated end-to-end browser-based tests, security scans, and more. All this and the average time from merge to production is still under 30 minutes.

This deployment speed is aided by having a robust feature branch process for our developers. We ran 50,034 CI/CD pipelines last year with an average duration of 23 minutes. This enables quick feedback loops, allowing us to merge 16,155 unique changes by 169 contributors across all our repositories. These pipelines perform linting, SAST scans, open source license scanning, build docker images, compile documentation, and intelligently run just the subset of tests affected by the change. Not bad for 23 minutes.

Milestone Releases

So, what’d we ship? Over the course of 2023, our product had over 180 meaningful feature improvements and additions across the platform, as well as countless design iterations, bug fixes, and performance improvements.

Development on our application started in 2012 using Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9, and has changed a lot since then. This year marks the completion of a milestone evolution we have been working on for the last few years. Our frontend is now fully a React application powered by a GraphQL API. Never content to rest on our laurels, we have started planning a move to Remix as we continue to evolve our application in 2024 and beyond.

Milestone releases in 2023 included the launch of a patient mobile application, a seamless platform migration of hundreds of thousands of Wellevate customers into the Fullscript platform, the use of natural language processing and machine learning to automate product curation, and a brand-new design for our patient experience just to name a few. We have also quietly been building towards the biggest release in Fullscript history, which is set to roll out to customers beginning in Q1 2024.

Developer Tools

While our product teams were busy delivering those features to our users, our internal tools teams were themselves making radical improvements to the developer experience. We shipped the first version of our cloud development environments and continue to invest in that space for a more error-free and machine-independent development process. Getting started with development is now as easy as running a few commands in the terminal. The emphasis on developer happiness and productivity has been a key ingredient in our success as we’ve scaled both our team and business.

Our architecture team started a code componentization process to ensure the monolith’s development remains easy and flexible while reducing error rates. The SRE team made huge strides in several key areas, including our first zero-downtime database upgrades on MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Not Done Yet

As you can see, it’s been an incredible year here at Fullscript. We continue to grow, ship amazing products, and provide the best possible engineering experience we can. And this is just the beginning — we continue to invest in new technologies, build new features while iterating on existing ones, and improve processes wherever possible.

By any metric, 2023 was the most successful year ever at Fullscript. We’re also incredibly excited about what 2024 will bring. We have big plans and can’t wait for you to see them.