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Oh boy does this comment resonate with my experience. Several times now I’ve had incoming Rails enthusiasts insist that RoR is the absolute best solution to all
by seattle_spring 3y ago
Oh boy does this comment resonate with my experience. Several times now I’ve had incoming Rails enthusiasts insist that RoR is the absolute best solution to all problems. Inevitably, once the project has more than 3 engineers, it becomes a disjoint, indecipherable mess that eventually gets re-written entirely.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Rails is the least-scalable framework ever when it comes to # of engineers. Someone is surely going to respond “you can just add more instances!” Not what I’m talking about, though it’s bad in that department too.
- mvdtnz 3y agoAnd I'll bet my bottom dollar that every developer who joined the team and was appalled at the state of the codebase said something like "if they just did Rails right it wouldn't be so bad!". Ad infinitum.
- seattle_spring 3y agoThis rings so true that it made me laugh out loud when I read it. I’ve heard this line from literally every Rails-engineer-peer I’ve worked with that I can think of, usually about codebases that they were in charge of.
- TenJack 3y agoI’m curious, what do you think the most scalable backend framework is (engineer wise)?
- eviluncle 3y agowhat kind of codebases were you working on? I've had the pleasure of working on 2 big companies using rails, each with well over 50 engineers and the code base was so relatively easy to jump into. The beauty of rails is that if you follow its guidelines, anybody can jump right in. what alternatives do you find are better when scaling up with more engineers?
- stouset 3y agoThe biggest issue I’ve seen is when companies hire 4 junior engineers with zero or minimal Rails experience to bootstrap their product, let them loose, and… yeah everything quickly becomes a mess. Nobody understands the conventions so they cargo cult whatever they found from a blog that was last updated in 2013. Or they find novel and extraordinary solutions to problems that the framework literally already solved. Or they have zero experience modeling things in a database—much less doing it the way ActiveRecord encourages—so every battle is always uphill. The biggest problem with convention over configuration is when you have a team where nobody understands the conventions. But what else do you expect?
- seti0Cha 3y agoI don't believe I've ever seen 4 junior engineers who don't know what they're doing build anything other than a mess. I don't have any experience with rails, so I can't say whether the mess would be worse, but those engineers are definitely going to make one without guidance.
- stouset 3y agoMy point precisely :) I will happily concede, though, that I do think in that sort of situation that Rails can very easily become worse than other languages/frameworks.