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> Willingness to work on brownfield Ruby projects is rare After working in a dev agency that took on outside Rails projects several times while I was there, my
by shantly 7y ago
> Willingness to work on brownfield Ruby projects is rare
After working in a dev agency that took on outside Rails projects several times while I was there, my conclusion is that Rails (not the only way to write even Web-focused Ruby, and not the only one I've used, but the only one that'll score you any points for hiring) is a pretty bad framework for any project that will have multiple teams on it over its lifetime, absent heroic technical direction & testing efforts that I've never actually seen in the wild—probably because young or outsourced teams picking Rails are doing it to move fast, over all other concerns.
You can take on or resurrect an average outside or old Rails projects. It's just slow and expensive.
Too much magic, too much room for doing things some way that the next person will never have seen before, too little grep-ability, too hard for your tools to help you.
- eropple 7y agoAgreed in full. I don't love Rails, either; I always used https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby (which I almost definitionally like, 'cause I wrote it). Rails is a framework that depends on developer continuity. I view Ruby as a tool for writing very specific things for experts, more than anything else. Web dev in general seems to be against that principle; Ruby could probably benefit a lot from more effort spent on ways to make it hard to do the Wrong Thing at this point.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoHonestly, I find Rails projects to unupgradeable. We found it to be easier to just rewrite the project when moving between major versions (Rails 4 to Rails 5 for example). Shoehorning old functionality into a newer Rails just made this inconsistent.
- shantly 7y agoGood call, coming on to a Rails project that's been upgraded—or worse upgraded twice—is... usually very unpleasant.