This isn't correct. The users/1 doesn't take you to the user with id=1, it takes you to the user with username=1, which is very different. For example you can

This isn't correct. The users/1 doesn't take you to the user with id=1, it takes you to the user with username=1, which is very different. For example you can see my github profile on this api by doing https://api.github.com/users/cvoege https://api.github.com/users/cvoege The link you gave there is to the person with the username 1. Second of all you can't see my email since it's not publicly available on github, and most people's aren't as far as I know. Third of all incremental integer ids isn't the "rails way", this would be decided by the database and has nothing to do really with rails or whatever framework you use.