Bellware's guidance for Rails developers in the Doctrine of Useful Objects talk. Use Rails only for the web-server layer; get in and out of Rails as quickly as possible. Keep your company's business-logic assets in `lib/` — create `lib/model/` with callable, easily-testable classes that encapsulate every database-touching operation. Learn to build Ruby libraries (understand how Rails itself is built, what `lib/` is for) in addition to being a Rails developer. Do not entangle your asset code with someone else's framework.