By Luigi Montanez & Ryan Resella

Launched just two years ago, Upworthy has quickly become one of the most popular sites on the Web. According to Quantcast, it's a Top 40 site in the U.S. and is the most visited site hosted on Heroku. And yes, it's powered by Ruby on Rails! Hear the story of how Upworthy started out as a modest Sinatra app, then moved to a monolithic Rails app, and has now been broken up into a set of services powered by Rails. Technical decision-making in the midst of massive growth will be described in detail.

Luigi is the founding engineer at Upworthy, a viral media site that aims to drive massive amounts of attention to the topics that matter most. Before Upworthy, Luigi was a software developer at the Sunlight Foundation. He also co-organizes Code for Atlanta.

Ryan is a Senior Engineer at Upworthy. In 2012 Ryan was an Engineer on the Technology Team at Obama For America that helped re-elect the President of the United States. Prior to OFA, Ryan was a 2011 Inaugural Code for America Fellow and then went on to become Technical Lead at Code for America.