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Yes, Ruby on Rails is worth learning. Especially if you are a JavaScript guy, a solo found and interested in the developer experience. Ruby and Rails give you a

Yes, Ruby on Rails is worth learning. Especially if you are a JavaScript guy, a solo found and interested in the developer experience. Ruby and Rails give you a nice dev experience in my opinion and the way you use Ruby changed the way I do JavaScript too. You can also be rather productive as a solo developer in Rails so I think it is a perfect fit for you. Down the road when you are comfortable with Ruby and Ruby on Rails you might want to look into Python too. Not so much for web development but there are a lot of devops tools out there that use Python. My background: I was a Python dev that worked PHP because that was the jobs I got (more than 10 years ago) and decided to invest more into JavaScript (2007) because I though it was going to be the future. When I couldn’t stand PHP anymore I got a Ruby job (because, still no Python web jobs back then) and it changed me fundamentally. I love Ruby and Rails till this day and Ruby, JavaScript and Python form the backbone languages.

ahmaman 5y ago
Thanks for the recommendation, seems that many people share your experience. Any learning resources that comes to mind if you would learn RoR from scratch today?
- johntdaly 5y ago
  With rails 7 still so fresh you will have to use the rails guide. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ Other than that you might find something interesting in on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/ The changes for frontend development between Rails 6 and Rails 7 are so huge that it doesn’t pay to get an old Rails 6 book right now.
le-hu 5y ago
I second that, RoR is worth it. Speaking of resources - https://www.railstutorial.org/ https://www.railstutorial.org/ Michael Hartl's tutorial is still one of the best ones, although it's rails 6 not the freshest 7.
digimono 5y ago
I had been working with ruby for the last 6 years, although my first experience with it backs to 2016. I used it in distinct stages of startups, in Canada, San Francisco and Sao Paulo. (from pre-seed to IPO) From my experience there's a lot of room to build robust applications using the vast and mature ecosystem of ruby. I had the opportunity to work with api only, with react on rails, pure erb with vanilla js. Each with some pros and cons. One of them was really interesting, based on lessons from Domain-Driven Rails, which I much appreciate for scaling busineses with high complexity in terms of rules. Tooling today is quite mature too, even from simpler ones as VSCode or even RubyMine (unfortunately paid as opposed to other editions... Subject for another thread tho). I'd highly recommend Ruby as a starting point for founders, cause there's no silver bullet indeed, however the speed and flexibility of a full featured Rails app today is impressive. Both for coding core app features, scripting and even fastly mungling data (let's be honest, it's quite common pivoting in early stages) using the rails console. Yeah, single thread and stuff out of the box, but I'd guess that a startup having such a requirement in day 1 is 1 in a hundreds of thousands cases (I can be wrong, want your thoughts too folks).
chaosharmonic 5y ago
Can you expand a bit on the perspective shift before and after picking up Rails? Asking as a full-stack JavaScript dev who recently started branching down this path myself. One thing in particular that it's still really hard to get used to is keeping track of a whole discrete set of framework conventions while also making a first meaningful dive into Ruby to begin with. It's nice not having to, say, implement logins myself, but it's still a little mystifying how indistinguishable from magic that approach makes things looking at it from the outside. (But then again I guess when I first picked up JavaScript I wasn't also concurrently learning React or Express...)

ahmaman 5y ago

Thanks for the recommendation, seems that many people share your experience. Any learning resources that comes to mind if you would learn RoR from scratch today?

johntdaly 5y ago
With rails 7 still so fresh you will have to use the rails guide. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ Other than that you might find something interesting in on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/ The changes for frontend development between Rails 6 and Rails 7 are so huge that it doesn’t pay to get an old Rails 6 book right now.

le-hu 5y ago

I second that, RoR is worth it. Speaking of resources - https://www.railstutorial.org/ https://www.railstutorial.org/ Michael Hartl's tutorial is still one of the best ones, although it's rails 6 not the freshest 7.

digimono 5y ago

I had been working with ruby for the last 6 years, although my first experience with it backs to 2016. I used it in distinct stages of startups, in Canada, San Francisco and Sao Paulo. (from pre-seed to IPO) From my experience there's a lot of room to build robust applications using the vast and mature ecosystem of ruby. I had the opportunity to work with api only, with react on rails, pure erb with vanilla js. Each with some pros and cons. One of them was really interesting, based on lessons from Domain-Driven Rails, which I much appreciate for scaling busineses with high complexity in terms of rules. Tooling today is quite mature too, even from simpler ones as VSCode or even RubyMine (unfortunately paid as opposed to other editions... Subject for another thread tho). I'd highly recommend Ruby as a starting point for founders, cause there's no silver bullet indeed, however the speed and flexibility of a full featured Rails app today is impressive. Both for coding core app features, scripting and even fastly mungling data (let's be honest, it's quite common pivoting in early stages) using the rails console. Yeah, single thread and stuff out of the box, but I'd guess that a startup having such a requirement in day 1 is 1 in a hundreds of thousands cases (I can be wrong, want your thoughts too folks).

chaosharmonic 5y ago

Can you expand a bit on the perspective shift before and after picking up Rails? Asking as a full-stack JavaScript dev who recently started branching down this path myself. One thing in particular that it's still really hard to get used to is keeping track of a whole discrete set of framework conventions while also making a first meaningful dive into Ruby to begin with. It's nice not having to, say, implement logins myself, but it's still a little mystifying how indistinguishable from magic that approach makes things looking at it from the outside. (But then again I guess when I first picked up JavaScript I wasn't also concurrently learning React or Express...)