ThemeForest is Envato’s flagship digital marketplace for WordPress themes and web templates. The codebase is a large Rails monolith deployed to production automatically via Samson when branches merge to master, with Buildkite for CI. My work over nine months was primarily infrastructure reliability and technical debt reduction rather than feature development.
Key Contributions
Database work on large tables: The items table had 50M+ rows, so schema
changes required gh-ost for transparent online migrations. I worked on index
additions, query optimization (refactoring User#authored_items_count to
eliminate redundant queries, adding indexes on item_comments for common
access patterns), and charset/encoding normalization across the database.
Not technically glamorous work, but at that table scale, getting a migration
wrong means downtime.
Monolith cleanup: Systematic removal of deprecated systems — dropping legacy tables and their associated models, controllers, and background jobs. Each removal had to be coordinated carefully in a codebase this size, where dead code often had unexpected references. This included deprecated billing tables, legacy key management, sitemap infrastructure, and fraud check integrations that were no longer in use.
Performance and observability: Added DataDog timing instrumentation to the
NextGen API request pipeline, implemented ThreadedConnectionHandling for
better ActiveRecord connection management, and improved MySQL reconnect
reliability. Made ProcessPhotoJob idempotent with proper error handling.
Developer experience: Reorganized test infrastructure, added MySQL debugging tooling for development, and improved Buildkite CI configuration.