Getting Started with the Sorbet Type Checker in Rails

At Monolist, we’re building a command center for engineers. We integrate with the APIs of all the tools engineers commonly use to aggregate their tasks in one place. For example, our customers trust us to pull in their Jira issues, Github pull requests, and Pagerduty alerts in real-time, so that they can triage, prioritize, and complete their work all from within Monolist.Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. The APIs of these SaaS tools vary wildly, and assumptions about responses and return values propagate through our Ruby on Rails backend. When these assumptions are incorrect, because of Ruby’s dynamic nature, they manifest as runtime errors that cause issues for our users, and are difficult to debug. We realized quickly that we could benefit from types. While our frontend and mobile clients are written in Typescript, we didn’t have a good solution for our large rails API.