There, I said it. Even though most of my professional experience is working in the Ruby on Rails environment, I rarely like to admit that. Not consciously, but sub-consciously I’m affected by the industry notion that Rails is a framework for n00bs and that Ruby can’t be used for anything serious. It hasn’t been my experience, but the Hacker News mindset on Rails eats at my insecurities.
However, hanging out at Railsconf, where I'll be giving the talk How We Made Our App So Fast it Went Viral in Japan, I'm feeling very excited about this 15-year-old framework I use every day.
I am a perfectly capable software developer who can code outside of Rails just fine. But Ruby on Rails is how I stay efficient. It’s what lets me translate what is going on in my brain and turn it into pixels before I lose my train of thought. Rails makes a lot of tradeoffs—They call this magic. It's the things the framework does without making it clear in the file what it is doing. But all technology makes tradeoffs, and Rails remains so lovely for those who use it well.
I’m not a Rails absolutist or apologist—I like to acknowledge its many warts. Perhaps that’s why I don’t introduce myself as a Rails developer. I have always seen our Rails app, dev.to as an eventually not Rails app. Maybe not this year or next, but I feel like eventually it will be the dev.to codebase, a portion of which is based on Rails. But I don’t understand why more people don’t start projects with Rails regardless of their notions of what a perfect finished app looks like. It’s the ultimate starter project software and it can scale as far as you feel like scaling it. In startup land I feel like Silicon Valley moved past Rails because it was no longer fashionable—and lost a lot of productivity in doing so.
I recall a blog post about a new company that had some non-technical momentum which was completely derailed by taking a simple idea and writing it in Go microservices. I cannot remember where I found the post, but the story was telling. They scratched their work and took a week or two with Rails to make up for months of lost productivity overthinking the problem.
Startups should be the ones embracing the fast productivity Rails offers and not rejecting it out of vague future concerns—or fashion.
I got back to Rails in order to create dev.to because I was getting burnt on a complicated application and I needed to get back to an environment where I could wrap my head around the whole thing. What started as therapy turned into momentum because things were moving fast and the website fit the greater project’s needs in that small changes could be implemented in a timely fashion. But speed isn't about being sloppy, it's about working with an opinionated framework that seeks to have all the tools you need remain within grabbing distance when you need them. If you cannot get past the phase in a project where a few people need to be quick and productive early on, you won't have scaling problems, you'll have never-launched problems.
And it’s not just small projects like mine that benefit from the Rails environment. Any large company is filled with small projects—or at least they should be. Rails remains the standard of productivity in most web development environments.
Rails is not the only “simple” framework. There have been many new inspired projects, but it is the most mature simple framework. It’s evolving nicely, staying just behind the bleeding edge of web development and introducing good new features along the way. Rails 5.2 looks nice and I'm happy with the state of things.
I’m Ben and I am a proud Rails developer.
Oldest comments (80)
I do believe that the project Ruby 3x3 will make Rails shine again.
I agree, the only issue is "time to market".
Ruby Conferences will do that to you.
I was at RubyConf last year when I had just accepted a PHP job, and I was already awash with feelings of nostalgia and "why couldn't it have been a Rails job?"
All of my side projects are still in Rails (unless I specifically took them on to help me learn something else).
Somehow I didn't have much to do with Ruby in my dev career.
First I worked at a dev shop that did PHP for years.
Later I switched to JavaScript, when Node.js came out.
Just knew a few students at university who did internships with Rails and they came back pretty disenchanted, so I never considered it later.
Now I'm pretty happy that I went for JavaScript back in the days. Browsers, React-Native, Electron, Node.js, AWS Lambda, pretty much everything can be used with it.
Yeah, I wouldn't really advise anyone who doesn't already use Rails to feel like they need to get into it. Especially when you're well-versed in other fields that are way more hot.
But I think a lot of current Rails developers feel like they are supposed to move off for JS stacks or otherwise. It's just not the case. Rails is in a lovely mature state.
I'm using node by way of yarn and webpack but I never built a node app so I'm just using it as a tool.
I don't know exactly why but I've never felt the attraction.
Does it make sense? There are some technologies that, unless you end learning because it's required of you, you don't pursue.
Am I missing something? Surely, but there's also a limit on how many pieces of tech we need to learn to write web apps.
Depends on what you want to do.
If you build front-ends, you probably need Node.js as a tool.
If you build back-ends, you may use Node.js as the server, but you could also use Rails or something else.
Agreed. I dipped my toes in the GraphQL ecosystem and the "universe" keeps telling me I should use Node for that :-)
This is because investors in startups (and founders) are only rewarded for productivity when it matters. In one startup, I used Django to build an MVP, because having a product at that point was critical. At another, they measure "productivity" completely differently, i.e., do something so that it looks like we're doing something. That's a poor long-term strategy, but I imagine is more prevalent in the Valley since that startup is closer to SV than the Django MVP one.
That said, I still pretty much use Django, because I care about productivity and moving on.
100%. I wrote an API in Go but the sister web app is going to be in Django 2. There's no way I'm going to write a web app in Go, I'd be many times slower and fighting static typing 😝
I can love both eheh
Slower? I don't really think so
Hi Francis,
I'm totally focusing on me here. Go is definitely faster than Django and Python.
What I meant is that I would be slower in building a prototype MVP of a web app which is essentially Django admin and a few dashboards I guess. That doesn't reflect badly on the language itself just on my limited experience with Go.
Also although I can justify the choice of building an API server for millions of clients in Go I don't feel comfortable enough nor I would find it advisable to build the front-end and administration tools with it.
Hope this clears up my sentence.
Putting it this way, sure clear things up
Replace "Rails" in this post with "Laravel", and everything still applies.
Unless your name isn't Ben
Haha
if you had work on both of them, I think you wouldn't say the same
There's no greater honour for Rails than to inspire others.
I left PHP for Ruby in 2007 and never looked back once.
Was just about to write that, 100% nailed it.
How was the process of turning a Rails App into a PWA? I am currently working on a Rails App for a Customer and he seems concerned that the app would not be as friendly for Mobile devices. Any thoughts or advise? Thanks for your posts that are always very helpful for Junior Devs like me :)
When we first got invested into the APIs related to service workers it seemed overwhelming but then I realized it's actually just a few simple things to start and you grow from there. The whole PWA ecosystem is still sort of overwhelming because it's not even clear what a PWA is.
But start by just building the most basic serviceworker.js possible, caching a few basic assets and go from there to build a basic manifest.json file and you're pretty much there already. PWA is basically just a website that is fast and has serviceworkers installed.
Thank you for this. I am so productive in rails and I keep trying to learn new backends outside of it. I always just end up back with a rails app but every time I hear about it, it's something negative.
Its so easy to use and deploy apps. I am even able to use it for making small, helpful databases for my coworkers and I in my very nontechnical (as in not webdev) job.
I'll just go ahead use whatever I like... As long as I'm finishing what I started, right?
Have fun at the conf!
This is an amazing post with a lot of words that many Rails developers have tried to say but couldn't. Congrats!
Thanks!
I will say my first reaction to seeing "I'm a rails developer" was to tell you I'm sorry for your loss.
This sort of mindset is something I'm trying to avoid, because at the end of the day the only thing that matters is this.
Does your software solve a problem?
I think we all have some sort of ego when it comes to the software WE use and tend to think of others as not as good, or subpar, it's almost human instinct. The reality is that we should choose whatever makes the most sense for the problem your trying to solve.
This article hits the nail on the head. Software choice is irrelevant if you can't solve a problem with it, and the needs for many startups is quick development and ability to change ships fast. You can worry about things like scalability, testing, etc.. once your business is proven and it is more important for your software to be stable than adding new features.
Hard to tell exactly what your point is, and it seems as though you're contradicting yourself?
Like you're saying your stack choice doesn't matter at first, and then you go on to describe how people choose their stack because it helps them develop quickly and ship changes fast?
Choosing the stack that helps them ship fast and they are comfortable with instead of the stack that will provide the most performance, security, or has the most popularity is the point.
Where is the contradiction? The stack choice not mattering is the exact same thing as saying choose what your good with so you can ship fast instead of worrying about details that don't matter early on like scalability.
"I will say my first reaction to seeing "I'm a rails developer" was to tell you I'm sorry for your loss.
This sort of mindset is something I'm trying to avoid, because at the end of the day the only thing that matters is this."
So you're implying that Ben picked Rails because it's trendy? Like you assume that it's "bad" to "pick a framework you like" and you're implying that you look down upon Ben for being so foolish. Then you go on to say "if the software solves your problem then bingo you're golden" as if this isn't exactly what Ben did by choosing Rails?
Like overall, whatever you're saying just sound self contradictory and confusing. It's as if you're saying "ah ha you're such a fool for picking a framework that is simply trendy, as if you didn't pick Rails because it does solve your software problems."
Dude you good? I explicitly said that I am trying to avoid behavior of looking down on others for the technology choices they make just because those choices are different than my preferences. You are trying to argue on a post that is 2 and half years old that you CLEARLY misunderstood.
Nope never came close to implying this.
I literally said the opposite by stating that this was behavior I am trying to avoid.
The whole point of my comment. Software choice is irrelevant as long as it solves your problem. Of course Ruby isn't able to solve every problem because of how high level it is, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it if it solves your problem.
It is honestly like your trying to pick a fight and are intentionally reading the words I'm saying with malice.
I see your point now, but you didn't state it very clearly at first.
Lol, I'm not trying to start a fight, I'm just trying to understand what you were saying, which was very confusing.
Well said Ben, Rails is still a solid piece of technology.
I had to make modifications in a web app I haven't touched in a while and was super happy that thanks to Arel and Rails writing complex queries is a breeze.
Having wrote an app in Go I definitely agree, what you get in power you lose in productivity. It's also hard to find developers and that's another thing you should keep in mind when starting a business venture.
It's like we all forgot that the old saying "premature optimization is the root of all evil" applies also to technological choices.
Rails can be scaled and if you arrive at the limits of it it's, hopefully, because you have a very successful product 😎
These big frameworks are perfectly fine in 2018.
I guess this microservice thing went to our heads a little. Most apps should be a monolith first.
I bookmarked the news on Rails 5.2 ✌🏾
Couldn't agree more! Thanks Ben!
I have use Rails, Laravel & Elixir/Phoenix, and I could say nothing could compare to the productivity that Rails bring to us. And the integration with Javascript like React/Vue, etc make the best of both world.
We basically can create web app with any framework/language, but for my experience when working with Phoenix & Laravel, most of my time was spend on re-invent the wheel on the thing Rails gems had provided us for very long time.
For example, making nested form in Rails is so simple, we don't even have to think, but in Phoenix we have to manually write thing for it, lot of work & effort to mimic Rails nested forms. In Laravel, well I think they don't even know the idea of nested forms.
At the end of the day, only user can decide the success of our web app. I rather choose a framework with high productivity, quick change to user need rather than spend a lot of time (because of our choice of technology) work on a product that nobody want to use because it's take to long to adapt to user need.
I’m Hoang and I am a proud Rails developer.
Yeah the ecosystem in Rails is huge, you rarely don't find a library you need :-)
BTW if you want to elaborate on your experience of using Phoenix professionally I would love to read a post about that. I still say to myself that one day I'll learn Elixir but I never get to it :D
I'm an ex-Django developer who hasn't ever done more ruby than it takes to edit my Sass configuration because it seems like hard work and too many (). I never thought it was n00bish.
I think Rails looks awesome except for maybe getting into monkey patch hell, and the fact that for years I thought the logo was a tentacle.
It's still on my wishlist for things to learn!
Why ex-Django :D ? Where did you migrate to? :D
I moved to agencies which are all PHP, unfortunately.
Try to introduce best practices and frameworks to make your life easier. I've heard good things about Laravel.
Good for you! Use what you know, use what you love. I'm a proud Perl (and Mojolicious) user. Sure I see people pointing and laughing at me, but you know what? I'll finish my webapp before them!
web app race :D
"dev.to as an eventually not Rails app."
What are you planning to move it to?
Creator of those parody O'Reilly book covers you might have seen around. 😄Seriously? :O It's my honor, Ben