Crunchy Bridge's Ruby Backend: Sorbet, Tapioca, and Parlour-Generated Type Stubs

When we started building Crunchy Bridge two years ago, we chose Ruby as the language to write our database state machine and control plane API. Ruby may not have been the most popular language choice in 2022, but we picked it anyway. A major reason is that everyone on the team already knew it well and liked it. Terse and elegant syntax is perfect for expressing our database state machine logic. Another reason we picked Ruby is that it lets us have a REPL running in production so we can carry out flexible operational work, and expediently thanks to that same terse syntax. Ruby is so efficient for managing a big fleet of servers that it feels a bit like cheating compared to clunky admin dashboards and CLIs.