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Discussion on: Take the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Edited

How did you learn to code?

It's been so long I can't remember what was the major contribution.

I was writing macros for Wordpress in 1998.
I was creating websites in 1999 with FrontPage
I was modding UT99 engine in 2001 and then a string of modding many different games.

How many Rails applications have you contributed to?

I started coding in Rails in 2005 on version 0.86 so I've coded on 50+ Rails applications.

How often do you contribute back to open source projects?

I contribute significant hours in bursts for a few months throughout the year.

Which Ruby gems frustrate you the most? (This is always a fun one.)

Nokogiri, because its the slowest gem to install that is required by default.
I don't know if this is is still relevant since Rails 6 but therubyracer or anything that depends on v8 lib.

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Erica Tafavoti

Hi Andrew! Sorry for the confusion – would love if you answered these questions and more in the full survey, linked here and in the post! rails-hosting.com/

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Edited

There was no confusion. I just wanted to publically share the questions you asked for passerbyers to encourage engagement.

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Erica Tafavoti

Thanks so much for doing that, Andrew! Appreciate your thoughts here.

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Ben Greenberg

+1 for Nokogiri, it's comical at this point how long it takes to install.

I first starting coding with Rails in 2017, and now it's a major part of my job for the past year and a half. My most recent frustrations with Rails has been Webpacker and the asset pipeline.

We are refactoring our specialized documentation platform built as a Rails app into a whitelisted gem executable that will take the path for documentation and boot up a fully featured and branded docs platform. Our biggest hurdles initially were namespacing, folder configuration and changing the default behavior that zeitwerk, the asset pipeline etc. expected. Once we figured that out though, the rest has been pretty straightforward.

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Webpacker is my second largest compliant because I can no longer easily create a web-app.
Rails is supposed to be convention over configuration and I felt it broke the spirit of the framework when I could no longer easily just 'get going' and its the main reason I didn't upgrade my apps to Rails 6.

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Ben Greenberg

I completely relate to that.

I think the issue is a conceptual one. How do you integrate a second language's ecosystem of libraries, dependencies, etc. into a framework built primarily for the first language?

It used to be that you could accomplish everything for a full stack web app in Rails alone. You still can, truthfully, but a lot of clients, companies and consumers are expecting certain behavior that gets very challenging to duplicate without client-side JavaScript, and JavaScript has gone from a couple script tags to an entire universe of complexity, in and of itself.

Complicated stuff!

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Erica Tafavoti

Nokogiri was most frequently named a "most frustrating" gem in the 2018 version of this survey! rails-hosting.com/2018/