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Rails 6 is out, should I upgrade and start re-learning now?

Kurt Bauer on September 27, 2019

It was brought to my attention this morning that the new version of Rails was released, currently Rails 6.0: Action Mailbox, Action Text, Multipl...
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Seth

Like your friend, it depends, lol. I work at an agency that starts many projects each year. With that, we're lucky enough to greenfield almost all of them and use the latest versions of things. So, we wait very little. However, I think more places are not like us and wait longer. It takes time to upgrade and time equals money ultimately.

One nice thing about Rails is the stability of the framework. Yes there are changes with a major version bump, however, the large majority remains the same. Solving problems in Rails 5 will not severely hamper you if you were to end up working in Rails 6 in the future. You'll be knowledgeable about most of the framework and the new code might not even be using any Rails 6 specific things.

In my opinion, keep doing what you're doing. Finish your project, then upgrade it. You'll learn some things along the way.

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Kurt Bauer

Now that both you and Ben both advised the same thing, I'll definitely take that route. Thanks for the confidence booster, Seth

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Ben Halpern

In your situation I wouldn't stress the upgrade right away.

The migration should be pretty straightforward once you go to do it (that's not always the case, but seems to be with Rails 6)

Being a little behind in Rails world has never been a big problem IMO. Try not to create any major hacks with will make the upgrade harder.

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Kurt Bauer

Thanks, Ben! Was hoping you'd see this haha, if I can ask, how does dev.to handle language/framework updates. What would be the time frame you have before updating and what's the process like leading up to the update?

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Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

If your project has yet to reach production, if you don't have a tight deadline in front of you then upgrade now.