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Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

517 points by 541 3y ago

mosselman 3y ago
I had a lot of fun watching this documentary. The one person framework really comes out in the personal story of Toby from Shopify. "From Hello World to IPO". What I also loved is that he mentioned that if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. Sure that can be true for many apps, but in a world of, for example, APIs and front-end stacks, that isn't always the case. The latest developments in Rails are making the solid foundation even more solid. There is stuff happening to make infrastructure easier: Kamal sure, but also Solid Cache and Solid Queue and there is a lot happening in the front-end with Turbo (Morphing) and mobile apps with Turbo Native and Strada. We have upgrade to 7.1 already and have a mobile app in production that is built with Turbo Native. I am also excited to start replacing our Redis cache with Solid Cache to make everything simpler and cached longer. Great to see the Rails community so alive and see the deep connection the (ex) core team members have to the framework!
- brap 3y ago
  >if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one I've never worked with Rails, but this sounds amazing. One of the things I really hate about the Node.js ecosystem is that there are no clear conventions, the structure is always different even when the same framework is used. It's a mess. The exception is probably Next.js but it's more frontend-y.
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    True, nodejs really doesn't have _the_ framework. Python had flask, php is WordPress and RoR. Why is that? Especially since most of the new frameworks copy the ideas of existing frameworks. P.S. Perhaps because a JS framework based off the ideas of rails would be called jails! /s
    - dkdbejwi383 3y ago
      > P.S. Perhaps because a JS framework based off the ideas of rails would be called jails! /s https://sailsjs.com/ https://sailsjs.com/
    - monooso 3y ago
      Laravel would be a better example for PHP, especially as it borrowed so many ideas from Rails.
      - pocketsand 3y ago
        Correct.
      - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
        I agree. The only frameworks I’ve found about as productive as Rails are Laravel and Phoenix. Django and Sails.js both seemed like they were a step down in terms of general productivity, though each had a unique advantage of their own (admin out of the box, websockets & realtime features). I haven’t had a chance to really give RedwoodJS a trial run, but it's the JS-based fullstack framework I'm most curious about.
        kugelblitz 3y ago
        After a few years, and as my own application has grown, I feel I'm more productive in Symfony than Laravel, because there's less magic, I know where stuff is, and it's more "loosely" coupled components whilst Laravel is "All in or get out". I've been updating my app since Symfony 3.3-ish to now 6.3 and it's been fun! I've had to exchange the auth, the admin section, added new features, killed off features, but I feel with time, that my code has gotten more stable. Maybe my first update experience with Laravel was a bit of a mess (v4.2 to v5.0 "The recommended method of upgrading is to create a new Laravel 5.0 install and then to copy your 4.2 site's unique application files into the new application. This would include controllers, routes, Eloquent models, Artisan commands, assets, and other code specific to your application."), and I couldn't easily "see" the models' properties and the Facades, that's why I have shy-ed away from it a bit. I have worked with several Laravel applications since then and have gone through the v6 through v10 upgrade cycle and can say it's gotten easier (though I wish they could settle on a release schedule), but my preference is still Symfony. Plus when I checked out Django, I felt a bit more "at home" (e.g. see Twig templating language and how they used Django templating language as inspiration). I've worked with Vue.js and AngularJS 1 and Angular 2+, but I'm glad htmx is coming in strong, so I can focus on logic, speed and stability instead of glueing the frontend and backend API together and debugging in the different browsers.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Many of the Node projects (typically Express) I've built start out super tiny, one or two files, but once they grow to any production-level complexity, I find myself more or less mirroring the Rails structure.
  - Pmop 3y ago
    Not "any" but "most". I've worked for a company whose RoR codebase/structure looked completely different from the usual because they used a Domain Driven Design-inspired architecture.
    - danmaz74 3y ago
      I really liked the DDD book, but I think that many of the suggestions mostly apply to huge "do it all" enterprise applications, which are also not the best fit for Rails. So I think it's OK if you can't easily apply those patterns to a Rails app - if you actually need to build a single enterprise application to rule them all, you should probably choose a different framework anyway.
    - tinco 3y ago
      This is due to a conflict of philosophies within the RoR community. Basically the clean code enthusiasts (which are also more likely to subscribe to DDD) argue that business logic should not be tied to which specific web application framework you use. So it should basically be in a separate codebase, either in the `lib/` directory or literally in a different project and included into your application as a Gem. This makes sense from an objective perspective on what constitutes clean code, and I used to believe that this is what a really large enterprise Rails codebase should be refactored to eventually (although I never personally did so). Rails offers an alternative approach to this however, that is less neat from an objective perspective, but actually follows the Rails principles a lot better and it's called Rails engines. Basically you split your Rails app up into multiple mini-rails apps for each domain called Rails engines, each has the same directory structure as a Rails app and you get the full benefits of a regular Rails app inside each. I used to think this was an ugly approach and I never even considered it, but now after over a decade of Rails development I've made a 180 and I believe this is the way to go. The "clean" way forces you to construct interfaces between your business logic and the Rails app, basically introducing a lot of extra boiler plate. All for the perceived benefit of making your business logic be abstract of the Rails framework. This violates YAGNI of course, and by a huge margin too. I've never seen the business logic of a Rails app be ported to some other framework in 15 years, the most I've seen is reusing code in a Grape API that was mounted inside the Rails app. And what you give up is Rails' convention over configuration and its predictable structure, and the general documentation and knowledge of that structure that people can carry from job to job.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
    It's a huge benefit for agency/consultant work. You can jump into a project you've never seen before and just know where everything is and how it's wired together. You can be immediately productive. The downside is if you want to do something that cuts "across the grain" so to speak, things can get messy. Combine that with Ruby's high dynamism and someone trying to be too clever can make a mess fast (alias_method_chain anyone?). Yeah, node has been incredibly successful but I think it's a fair criticism to say it's also a victim of that success in that it just feels like so much arbitrary complexity. And the flavor of the month changes so fast that projects end up this weird mishmash.
  - dominuskelvin 3y ago
    [dead]
- ksec 3y ago
  And lots more. Ruby 3.3 YJIT is 2x faster than Ruby 2.5 in RailsBench. Work on brining more Ruby Gem from C to Ruby ( easier JIT ) Lots of dev tooling around Ruby and Rails coming. Hopefully there are more good things to come in Rails 8.0 and Ruby 3.4
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago
  What's funny to me is I have been doing Rails for 15 years, even wrote books on it, and I just thought Tobi was a guy who made a lot of popular Rails stuff. Didn't realize he was the founder and worth 5.5 billion dollars lol
- hmans 3y ago
  [dead]
- bbx 3y ago
  > “From Hello World to IPO” Which specific documentary is it? Google seems to return a few different options.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    The linked Youtube video.
    - bbx 3y ago
      Ah yes, around 41 min in… Thanks for the reply.
- bluedino 3y ago
  The structure of Rails was my first experience of web development (as a job, at least) and it completely ruined me for anything else.
- southwesterly 3y ago
  So if I have an idea for an online service / app. I can go an make it using Ruby on Rails all on my lonesome? Do I have to deal with JavaScript in any way?
  - cooljacob204 3y ago
    > I can go an make it using Ruby on Rails all on my lonesome Sure can. However I won't pretend it's the only framework you can do this with and be productive. I love Rails and Ruby but it has great competitors these days. > Do I have to deal with JavaScript in any way? Really depends on what you're doing but probably.
  - gls2ro 3y ago
    > Do I have to deal with JavaScript in any way? You can use Hotwire (look at turbo frames and turbo streams) and you will write less Javascript code while achieving some very nice interactive UI.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I'm going to have go push back on this. I don't like the RoR community, not because they're bad people, but because I think they're insane from a tech perspective. I only occasionally pick up RoR work because of how off-putting my first experience was. But what makes it worse is that every project I've been on (including one I just started on a few weeks ago) has just been a cluster. What you're saying here is true in theory, but what you're not telling people is how the community is about as close to the attitude of npm as you can get on the server side. hundreds of gems on your typical application, many of which are used in 1 or 2 places, helping avoid a grand total of less than 5 lines of code. Then there's the ratwheel you opt into with rails. Every single damned time I find myself having to manually patch libraries to get it working properly. I even once had to track down an old Ubuntu image of a version that had EoL'd 5 years prior and THEN had to manually patch a few C dependencies just to get it to build and run. Don't even get me started on wkhtmltopdf, fuck that dependency. If you use that in your RoR project, fuck you. ^ that's only partially meant to be humourous. My experience is that developers suggest RoR then run off into the sunset on their new project, leaving companies not understanding that they're now on a ratwheel of maintenance and upgrades until it's so bad only someone such as myself even has the skillset necessary to pick up the pieces. Contrast this with asp.net core. Each LTS version is supported for 2 years (which is too short imo), but more importantly, you can install the EOL versions just fine. I would never recommend RoR over asp.net core (asp.net 6+ ... LTS only) because developer productivity isn't worth the maintenance cost.
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    .NET's LTS releases are supported for 3 years and STS are supported for 18 months. I wish LTS support was 5 years, it seems like ecosystem has matured enough post-going-OSS-wild-ride starting with .NET 6 release and is ready for such a support timeframe. Or at least they could have every other LTS be ELTS? Also, I do wonder if RoRs perceived productivity is by inertia? I have a hard time believing you can top the productivity of quick scaffolding for back-end you get circa .NET7-8?
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      you're right, looking closer I got my wires crossed. non-LTS is 2 years, LTS is 3 years https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/d... imo, short term RoR will beat the pants off asp.net core in terms of developer productivity. mid to long term asp.net core wins hands down in terms of developer productivity. I don't think the RoR productivity story is fake, but I do think it's not worth the long term maintenance costs.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one Totally agree! Developers tend to really undervalue this aspect of RoR. In addition to easier onboarding, it greatly reduces bikeshedding. MVC maybe isn't the best paradigm for everything, but it's good enough for most things.
  - mooreds 3y ago
    > Developers tend to really undervalue this aspect of RoR. I agree! I think maybe because the consistency only shows its value: * over years * in its absence (on other projects which aren't using rails) Which means it is easy to miss. I see the same thing with spring. Having constraints helps free you up to solve different kinds of problems. I lived through the "let's define everything from the ground up, picking all our libraries, etc" phase of Java (in the early 2000s; I remember Tapestry and Wicket and Struts and Expresso and XMLC). Would prefer to not do that again. But coalescing on a particular framework is something that a community has to arrive at together. While I think that JavaScript, for example, would benefit from this, I don't know how to encourage it (other than by leaving comments on HN, maybe :) ). And don't think that coalescing means there are no other frameworks. Java has a number, and Ruby does too (trailblazer is a rails++ , Hanami is a rethinking of MVC, Sinatra is like flask). But having one big player makes it easier to focus on higher order solutions.
- qudat 3y ago
  > What I also loved is that he mentioned that if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one Which is funny because uncle bob cites this as a major downside to architecting code.
Andugal 3y ago
Honeypot documentaries are really good ! I highly recommend them.
dorianmariefr 3y ago
Watched it and loved it
Towaway69 3y ago
Two figures that inspired me were missing, why the lucky stiff and Ryan Bates from railcasts fame. Otherwise great docu with DHH "f*uk you" slide which does give an insight into successful open source projects.
- brightball 3y ago
  Ryan Bates is a legend
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    Ryan did so much for the rails community and all because of the joy for RoR. Unfortunately iirc Ryan suffered a burnout and had a lengthy break. I hope all that is better now.
    - rbates 3y ago
      All is better. I still plan to blog about the burnout.
      - Towaway69 3y ago
        Great to hear and please blog about it - folks need to be aware of the dangers of burnout. Unfortunately having folks around me that had burnout helped me to avoid one myself.
  - TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
    Indeed. Also, kudos to Chris Oliver for taking up the mantle. https://github.com/excid3 https://github.com/excid3
    - Lio 3y ago
      Definitely! Chris's stuff is great. The Ruby on Rails community struck me as different back in the day in how fun it was. It's hard to explain but coming from a Java background the community seemed to be full of interesting and engaging characters. Some people don't really appreciate that and prefer things to be very dry but I loved it. I'd like to shout out to Ryan Bates, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Zed Shaw, _why, Jason Seifer, Gregg Pollack, Sandi Metz, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Yehuda Katz, Dr Nic, Tenderlove and a whole heap more. Thanks everyone, you've made it a very entertaining journey.
aczerepinski 3y ago
Well done. One thing that struck me is how young the framework is in the big scheme of things. When I first got into programming around 10 years ago, people were already writing articles about how Rails was near obsolete so without giving it much thought I assumed it was from… maybe the early 90s?
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
One of my biggest mistakes as a dev was not really learning Rails until 2015. I just didn’t know how much faster building web apps could be.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Yeah me too. I am still sad thinking about the number of hours I spend messing with python environments and versions because I was told it was the “quick and easy” option for solving this or that small problem.* Also worth mentioning Michael Hart’s intro course, which is a really shockingly well done way to ramp up from absolute zero, even for someone with very little code experience. * Which, in fairness, it mostly is. But also meh.
  - silent_cal 3y ago
    Were you using Django?
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    His book is what got me up to speed in 2015. I was visiting Chiang Mai and binged through the whole thing over a few days and then spent the next week cloning various personal projects I'd written with JS backends. In under two weeks of opening Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, I was already more productive with RoR than with the stack I'd been using professionally for 3+ years.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  Same. I spent so long building Django apps and trying to solve problems that StackOverflow told me were inherently difficult, only to find out that Rails has built-in solutions. This isn’t even a criticism of Django; the things that Django does, it does very well. But there are a lot of things that it doesn’t do that a mature web app will eventually need to handle.
  - windowshopping 3y ago
    My biggest issue with rails is that the convention it forces you into feels like it's not really a one-size-fits-all solution. I typically build sites that are a one-page or 2-3 page JS app running on an API, as opposed to the more traditional idea of backend paths that return html views. And it seemed like rails wasn't well-suited to that, which was why I didn't stick with it.
hnarayanan 3y ago
This was so fun to watch. It’s great to see people find their calling and do great work and change the world for the better along the way.
berkes 3y ago
> if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. I used to love this, untill I started to hate it. I am convinced this is a major contributor to why so many Rails apps turn into an unmaintainable mess over years. Who measures onboarding in hours? It's fine if it takes a day or two to understand the domain. And the framework. And how they tie together. Talking about the domain: Rails puts "the plumbing" up front. Its how it achieves this consistency. My app is never about "models" or "http" or "databases". My app is about medicine-journals. Or loan-request-management. Or CRM. Rails makes itself important, at the cost of my domain. Rails' opinionatedness makes it so that this is hewn in stone. Its MVC is a given - and that's fine - major architectures should probably be dictated by the framework. But it's ORM - ActiveRecord also is a given. And that's not fine because AR (as an architecture and as how Rails implements it) is very unfit for a large category of applications. It's virtually impossible to swap AR out for anything else. Same with templates/views, JS, Caching, and many more: you can -in theory- replace them with a drop-in alternative. But you cannot -not even in theory- replace them with something that has an entirely different architecture or concept. This makes Rails not Omakase, but actually McDonalds: wherever in the world you come, you know exeactly what to expect, but it also makes boring and bland: no-one eats 7days/week McD. This makes all Rails apps look alike. Despite the fact that not one of the apps that "we" are building is alike another. Domain. Team. Project Planning. Combine any of them and the projects demand different things, but with Rails you are out of luck. Regardless if you build the next fintech platform with a team of 120 senior devs over 6 years, or you hack your "marketplace for coffeelovers" over the weekends alone: you get The Rails Way. One of those might be a perfect fit. But it's impossible they all are. Each team gets the same "menu". And in many cases it simply won't fit.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  I couldn't agree more. There is also a technology aspect to it. Rails is objectively veeeeeery slow. Concurrency support is nonexistent. This is not a good fit for all problems. It also to some degree prevents you from breaking out the parts that would benefit from a different language into their own services (Rails needs to call them, but it's really not good at IO).
Alifatisk 3y ago
Sounds like from the comments that Rails is gaining a little bit more popularity again instead of being known as the boring robust framework
- lagniappe 3y ago
  I probably won't use it again in any projects, but I liked the video because of nostalgia. Rails is a memory of a fun and scrappier me, a different time, appropriate in its own light for my path at the time.
  - DoesntMatter22 3y ago
    After doing lots of Node and Go I've recently come back to Rails and, no joke, it's about 5x faster in development for me. So many niceties. Using Prisma I had a 25 line method (and no real models) and that went down to 3 lines in Rails. It's just a night and day difference. I won't leave Rails again.
    - swlkr 3y ago
      Rails really is the premiere framework for web development speed
    - Alifatisk 3y ago
      I couldn't have said it better, its impressive how much you are able to do through Rails in such a short time.
  - Vayl 3y ago
    Why wouldn't you use it again and what would you use instead?
    - mplewis 3y ago
      Governance seems more invested in making ideological changes (dropping Webpacker, TypeScript, breaking changes between versions that add busywork but no value) than building the community and expanding reach. DHH continues to push poor technical decisions and alienate contributors by taking weird political stands. As someone who’s taken multiple projects to production in Rails and generally loves Ruby, these days I prefer to start new projects in full-stack TypeScript. RedwoodJS has been quite good.
0xferruccio 3y ago
Really amazing documentary! Been using Rails for the last couple of years and it’s just so productive for a small team to build product and follow well established patterns in building business logic. I’d recommend to those interested in seeing how a real Rails app is structured to look at the Jumpstart codebase as it’s a great resource on how to structure things https://jumpstartrails.com/ https://jumpstartrails.com/ As an alternative Bullet Train is pretty good, even though it adds a lot of bespoke libraries that aren’t the “Rails way” https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/
adrianlmm 3y ago
I saw it and I don't think it make it any justice, Ruby on Rails changed the paradigm of creating web applications with routes instead of files (like PHP, JSP and Webforms did) with the MVC pattern that now is present in every respectable web framework and the documentary doesn't tell that. It was enjoyable though.
- steve1977 3y ago
  MVC was already used in frameworks like WebObjects for example (and maybe others) quite a while before Ruby on Rails was born.
  - cooljacob204 3y ago
    Sure but I think the point is Rails popularized it.
    - runjake 3y ago
      MVC was popular before Rails. Rails certainly introduced MVC to a lot of new people, though.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      It probably made it more available to the masses (as WebObjects was not free and license costs where in the region of a car at some point)
- stevoski 3y ago
  Struts was a popular Java MVC framework in the early 2000’s and was pre-Rails. I kind of feel bad mentioning Struts and Rails in the same sentence, though, as Rails did much more than Struts.
  - cromulent 3y ago
    I do seem to remember DHH complaining about "XML pushups" when Rails was released, and knowing what he meant from Struts.
lagniappe 3y ago
sad to see _why the lucky stiff left out, but I suppose it is what he'd have wanted.
- chris_st 3y ago
  Don't remember _why doing any Rails development -- he was really key in Ruby land, but did his own (super-minimal) web thing called Camping. Anything I'm forgetting that he did with/for Rails?
- vario 3y ago
  his 'artsyness' was the main reason I avoided learning Ruby for years-- wrongly thinking people who code in Ruby speak like him. I know this is a possibly unpopular opinion but I don't think one should glorify a sophomoric book as a key Ruby book-- there are others that deserve that title, PickAxe is close, but I'd have liked a book like Whittaker's "C#, Player Guide" for Ruby.
  - sleight42 3y ago
    Perhaps Ruby isn't for you then? Matz's intent was and has been to bring joy and delight to developers, with the odd combination of PERL, LISP, and Smalltalk as his inspirations. Joy and delight don't necessarily equate with "most practical". But joy and delight are wonderful and healthful qualities to cultivate for a good life! _why embodied much of the spirit of the (at least earlier) Ruby community. We were software developer immigrants, many coming from prescriptive verbose technologies (I'm looking at you, Java!). We were eager for novel ways of expressing our ideas. Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities are, as far as I know, still all but unmatched beyond perhaps Smalltalk itself (and IO, which AFAIK no one uses seriously). _why's playfulness captured all of this in elegant and sometimes bizarre but often artistic expressions in his projects and code. I will never regret or apologize for the Ruby community's appreciation for the Poignant Guide. And, _why, wherever you are and whoever you are, thanks.
    - vario 3y ago
      [flagged]
LeonidBugaev 3y ago
What I really appreciate about Rails, is the strong vision, and not becoming another bloated framework for building "enterprise grade" applications. This is a 20-year-old framework, which does not afraid to radically change with time, and still being seen as Punk compared to rest It was so heartwarming to remember my Rails story, its been 20 years ago since I started using it! https://twitter.com/buger/status/1723040883325460818 https://twitter.com/buger/status/1723040883325460818
dmix 3y ago
Funny they show pictures of Berlin overlayed with "Toronto" at @22:16, I guess they meant to say Tobias moved from Germany->Canada but it made me ???.
- bewuethr 3y ago
  And in the shot before that, Chicago!
siva7 3y ago
There are so many legends from the early rails days that paved the way to how we develop modern web apps. I would go as far to say that in web development there is a time before and after rails emerged.
magicmicah85 3y ago
Going to have to watch this later today. I've messed with so many frameworks in the past - Laravel, ExpressJS, MeteorJS, Django, Flask, etc. All of them have their benefits and drawbacks and I've been at different knowledge levels when I've tried them all but I've always tried tutorials, done my own thing and given up. Three days ago I started using rails and I just flew through the weekend to get a MVP setup to show a coworker. Rails just made it easy to focus on what my app needs to do, not how my app needs to be implemented. I can finally see why people love it so much.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  I've been a Rails dev for a long time. I've tried a bunch of things and keep coming back to it for the same reasons as you. I'm incredibly productive in it. For the longest time, my primary complaint has been a lack of documentation/conflicting information when you break from convention. It can be extremely challenging to find/understand the "blessed" way of doing things. Thankfully, ChatGPT is extremely good at providing a starting point for this stuff.
  - theonething 3y ago
    Could you give an example of how ChatGPT helped you specifically with Rails?
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      The one that I use it the most for is writing ActiveMigrations while integrating with some of Postgres features. There's a lot of settings that get pass-thru to the DB, but aren't clearly documented. I know it's possible, I just can't remember the syntax. Same thing with some of the more advanced Model relationships. I just don't write _that_ many relationships, so I tend to forget how Rails wants certain things defined. Since a lot of things rely on config, rather than "normal" runtime code, it can be frustrating to debug. ChatGPT just gets me to the right answer. --- It's also pretty useful at gut checking DB design. There's been a few times where it's suggested a different approach than what I expected and I've preferred it's suggestions.
impish9208 3y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222535
- jslakro 3y ago
  played the HN lottery
  - impish9208 3y ago
    Yeah, a little frustrating. I think this is the second or third time that I get downvoted for pointing out a dupe of my submission.
    - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
      I downvoted this one because your thread had literally zero value to me (or any of us) as a reader. It had zero comments and it contained the exact same link as our current thread.
emmet 3y ago
Haven't touched rails in several years, but now I need to get an idea to get back into it!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
game_the0ry 3y ago
I tried to like ruby and rails, but when I tried to grok the language, I found it more difficult to follow than python + js (my daily drivers). Did anyone else feel the same way? I kind of want to give it another chance bc I have some side projects that I want to try out, but I find django/python and next/react easier to grok. Maybe I should try harder? FWIW, I also want to pick up good practices when it comes to engineering a back end, and the good ex-rails engineers I know tend to be really good in general.
- brightball 3y ago
  When I first started with Rails on a project I took over in 2012 I really disliked it. Today it’s something I repeatedly try to tell everybody about. It’s just so productive.
- samtechie 3y ago
  Interestingly, for me it is the exact opposite, I tried Django/Python and it's more difficult for me to grok. Somehow I just find Rails easier and more straightforward.
  - game_the0ry 3y ago
    I think its bc I just know python better. When I look at ruby code, especially with symbols, I can't really tell what's going on the same way I can with python. I get the impression python is more simple while ruby is more powerful (featurefull) + more object oriented.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      Yeah, probably. I just moved from Ruby to Python and I'm not exactly loving Python. But, I'm quite sure it's just that I'm not used to Python yet. I think one thing is true -- Ruby gives you lots of different ways to do things. And it can be really terse sometimes, if you want it to be. Some Ruby devs IMO should learn to favor readability over terseness. Overall though, Ruby is my favorite language and IMO can be very beautiful. I don't think anybody would call Python beautiful. (Lots of great things about it though, nice language and ecosystem... no hate)
scop 3y ago
I’m a longtime PHP/JS dev who recently decided to give Ruby and Rails a look given its influence on Laravel. The first thing I did was read the Rails Doctrine and, while I appreciated most of it, I thought "The Principle of The Bigger Smile" and DHH’s comments re Ruby's elegance were one self-indulgent-bridge too far. Back to the jaded PHP cave I go... That was until I learned that in Ruby: `someObj.some_var = 'hello'` Is syntactic sugar for: `someObj.some_var=('hello')` That made me smile. I have never smiled like that about a programming language. It literally gave me joy. I’ll be honest I have some trepidation devoting my time now to something “old”, but on the flip side my career is in PHP so what the hell am I talking about “old” for.
- corytheboyd 3y ago
  You’re going to love writing tests for Ruby! Nearly everything is a message send, which works insanely well with testing libraries. It’s so damn easy and clean to reach meaningful test coverage in Ruby where it feels like a chore in other languages
dividedbyzero 3y ago
I remember fondly when RoR was the hottest thing, so elegant and easy to understand, but I haven't touched it in ages. Is it still good compared to the more up-to-date stuff? Is it still relevant?
- block_dagger 3y ago
  Absolutely! I switched from PHP to Rails in 2008 and I've been able to upgrade all of the relevant projects to modern 7.1. Lots of changes/maturation along the way, but all in the right direction. Still best web framework for fast prototyping in 2023. I use Rails every day. Not the best for high concurrency or system tasks, but great for expressing maintainable business logic and working on web apps in teams.
- clivestaples 3y ago
  Yes. Hotwire is an incredible productivity booster. There can be some lag on waiting for the server to respond in some scenarios but I just drop into Stimulus and perform some manual "optimistic" UI updates -- usually in a just a few lines. I create all my new Rails projects with Tailwind and esbuild and have had no issues whatsoever. The new authentication stuff (generates_token...) is also a huge time saver.
sigzero 3y ago
They was a really good watch. The gentlemen in the video were and are very passionate about Rails.
- conductr 3y ago
  Early on, these guys had blogs and it was some of the only content you could find on Rails. The documentation was pretty much nonexistent and not very easy to grasp for newcomers. This was before railscasts even hit the scene but these guys, and a very few others, were like disciples spreading the word. I even remember at around that time there was a fundraiser specifically to hire someone to write better docs. I think it was some third party response to all the forums where people had been lamenting the desire for better docs. This was before go fund me and kickstarter so itself was a little unusual at the time.
timetraveller26 3y ago
By now I have watched many programming documentaries by Honeypot and I can't recommend them enough. They have documentaries of ue, React, GraphQL, Ember and some more.
battery_glasses 3y ago
I worked on a very large production rails app from 2015-2019 and came away loving Rails and hating Ruby. Give me Rails in TS or Go and I couldn't think of any reason to ever use anything else for a web app backend. The Rails Console has to be one of the greatest productivity enhancers I've ever come across.
- corytheboyd 3y ago
  I’d love to see a Go REPL that can do nearly as many things as you can do with a Ruby REPL. It’s just not really possible I think. It could be doable with TS with the existing node REPL, but Ruby really is a huge driver behind why Rails console is as useful as it is.
RENDYHerdiyana 3y ago
Hig and low
signatureMove 3y ago
Great story. I knew a bit about Rails beforehand but it's really nice to see the people involved with its growth.
wutwutwat 3y ago
This doc and the Elixir doc don't really capture much imo. They are short and hardly get the origin stories told before ending. There isn't much to get excited about before they are over, and they feel kinda like they exist to stroke the egos of those appearing in the film, and not so much to show the community or more importantly the people outside of the community, how awesome these things are. Give me a 1.5 hour long doc on elixir and rails and get past the patting each other on the backs part and into the struggles over the years, switch back and forth between different uses at different shops, etc. Essentially, steal the format of Indie Game The Movie and I'll be more into these because I want there to be great docs about software
- sauercrowd 3y ago
  very different from my perception - from unusual davids approach was to how the rails team formed through Toby and the others, merging with that other frameworks... so many small bits of history that are hard to digg up anywhere I wouldn't mind it being longer but it's great they were able to put it together
Vojin 3y ago
[flagged]
Vojin 3y ago
[flagged]

517 points by 541 3y ago

I had a lot of fun watching this documentary. The one person framework really comes out in the personal story of Toby from Shopify. "From Hello World to IPO". What I also loved is that he mentioned that if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. Sure that can be true for many apps, but in a world of, for example, APIs and front-end stacks, that isn't always the case. The latest developments in Rails are making the solid foundation even more solid. There is stuff happening to make infrastructure easier: Kamal sure, but also Solid Cache and Solid Queue and there is a lot happening in the front-end with Turbo (Morphing) and mobile apps with Turbo Native and Strada. We have upgrade to 7.1 already and have a mobile app in production that is built with Turbo Native. I am also excited to start replacing our Redis cache with Solid Cache to make everything simpler and cached longer. Great to see the Rails community so alive and see the deep connection the (ex) core team members have to the framework!

brap 3y ago
>if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one I've never worked with Rails, but this sounds amazing. One of the things I really hate about the Node.js ecosystem is that there are no clear conventions, the structure is always different even when the same framework is used. It's a mess. The exception is probably Next.js but it's more frontend-y.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  True, nodejs really doesn't have _the_ framework. Python had flask, php is WordPress and RoR. Why is that? Especially since most of the new frameworks copy the ideas of existing frameworks. P.S. Perhaps because a JS framework based off the ideas of rails would be called jails! /s
  - dkdbejwi383 3y ago
    > P.S. Perhaps because a JS framework based off the ideas of rails would be called jails! /s https://sailsjs.com/ https://sailsjs.com/
  - monooso 3y ago
    Laravel would be a better example for PHP, especially as it borrowed so many ideas from Rails.
    - pocketsand 3y ago
      Correct.
    - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
      I agree. The only frameworks I’ve found about as productive as Rails are Laravel and Phoenix. Django and Sails.js both seemed like they were a step down in terms of general productivity, though each had a unique advantage of their own (admin out of the box, websockets & realtime features). I haven’t had a chance to really give RedwoodJS a trial run, but it's the JS-based fullstack framework I'm most curious about.
      - kugelblitz 3y ago
        After a few years, and as my own application has grown, I feel I'm more productive in Symfony than Laravel, because there's less magic, I know where stuff is, and it's more "loosely" coupled components whilst Laravel is "All in or get out". I've been updating my app since Symfony 3.3-ish to now 6.3 and it's been fun! I've had to exchange the auth, the admin section, added new features, killed off features, but I feel with time, that my code has gotten more stable. Maybe my first update experience with Laravel was a bit of a mess (v4.2 to v5.0 "The recommended method of upgrading is to create a new Laravel 5.0 install and then to copy your 4.2 site's unique application files into the new application. This would include controllers, routes, Eloquent models, Artisan commands, assets, and other code specific to your application."), and I couldn't easily "see" the models' properties and the Facades, that's why I have shy-ed away from it a bit. I have worked with several Laravel applications since then and have gone through the v6 through v10 upgrade cycle and can say it's gotten easier (though I wish they could settle on a release schedule), but my preference is still Symfony. Plus when I checked out Django, I felt a bit more "at home" (e.g. see Twig templating language and how they used Django templating language as inspiration). I've worked with Vue.js and AngularJS 1 and Angular 2+, but I'm glad htmx is coming in strong, so I can focus on logic, speed and stability instead of glueing the frontend and backend API together and debugging in the different browsers.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Many of the Node projects (typically Express) I've built start out super tiny, one or two files, but once they grow to any production-level complexity, I find myself more or less mirroring the Rails structure.
- Pmop 3y ago
  Not "any" but "most". I've worked for a company whose RoR codebase/structure looked completely different from the usual because they used a Domain Driven Design-inspired architecture.
  - danmaz74 3y ago
    I really liked the DDD book, but I think that many of the suggestions mostly apply to huge "do it all" enterprise applications, which are also not the best fit for Rails. So I think it's OK if you can't easily apply those patterns to a Rails app - if you actually need to build a single enterprise application to rule them all, you should probably choose a different framework anyway.
  - tinco 3y ago
    This is due to a conflict of philosophies within the RoR community. Basically the clean code enthusiasts (which are also more likely to subscribe to DDD) argue that business logic should not be tied to which specific web application framework you use. So it should basically be in a separate codebase, either in the `lib/` directory or literally in a different project and included into your application as a Gem. This makes sense from an objective perspective on what constitutes clean code, and I used to believe that this is what a really large enterprise Rails codebase should be refactored to eventually (although I never personally did so). Rails offers an alternative approach to this however, that is less neat from an objective perspective, but actually follows the Rails principles a lot better and it's called Rails engines. Basically you split your Rails app up into multiple mini-rails apps for each domain called Rails engines, each has the same directory structure as a Rails app and you get the full benefits of a regular Rails app inside each. I used to think this was an ugly approach and I never even considered it, but now after over a decade of Rails development I've made a 180 and I believe this is the way to go. The "clean" way forces you to construct interfaces between your business logic and the Rails app, basically introducing a lot of extra boiler plate. All for the perceived benefit of making your business logic be abstract of the Rails framework. This violates YAGNI of course, and by a huge margin too. I've never seen the business logic of a Rails app be ported to some other framework in 15 years, the most I've seen is reusing code in a Grape API that was mounted inside the Rails app. And what you give up is Rails' convention over configuration and its predictable structure, and the general documentation and knowledge of that structure that people can carry from job to job.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
  It's a huge benefit for agency/consultant work. You can jump into a project you've never seen before and just know where everything is and how it's wired together. You can be immediately productive. The downside is if you want to do something that cuts "across the grain" so to speak, things can get messy. Combine that with Ruby's high dynamism and someone trying to be too clever can make a mess fast (alias_method_chain anyone?). Yeah, node has been incredibly successful but I think it's a fair criticism to say it's also a victim of that success in that it just feels like so much arbitrary complexity. And the flavor of the month changes so fast that projects end up this weird mishmash.
- dominuskelvin 3y ago
  [dead]
ksec 3y ago
And lots more. Ruby 3.3 YJIT is 2x faster than Ruby 2.5 in RailsBench. Work on brining more Ruby Gem from C to Ruby ( easier JIT ) Lots of dev tooling around Ruby and Rails coming. Hopefully there are more good things to come in Rails 8.0 and Ruby 3.4
DoesntMatter22 3y ago
What's funny to me is I have been doing Rails for 15 years, even wrote books on it, and I just thought Tobi was a guy who made a lot of popular Rails stuff. Didn't realize he was the founder and worth 5.5 billion dollars lol
hmans 3y ago
[dead]
bbx 3y ago
> “From Hello World to IPO” Which specific documentary is it? Google seems to return a few different options.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  The linked Youtube video.
  - bbx 3y ago
    Ah yes, around 41 min in… Thanks for the reply.
bluedino 3y ago
The structure of Rails was my first experience of web development (as a job, at least) and it completely ruined me for anything else.
southwesterly 3y ago
So if I have an idea for an online service / app. I can go an make it using Ruby on Rails all on my lonesome? Do I have to deal with JavaScript in any way?
- cooljacob204 3y ago
  > I can go an make it using Ruby on Rails all on my lonesome Sure can. However I won't pretend it's the only framework you can do this with and be productive. I love Rails and Ruby but it has great competitors these days. > Do I have to deal with JavaScript in any way? Really depends on what you're doing but probably.
- gls2ro 3y ago
  > Do I have to deal with JavaScript in any way? You can use Hotwire (look at turbo frames and turbo streams) and you will write less Javascript code while achieving some very nice interactive UI.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
I'm going to have go push back on this. I don't like the RoR community, not because they're bad people, but because I think they're insane from a tech perspective. I only occasionally pick up RoR work because of how off-putting my first experience was. But what makes it worse is that every project I've been on (including one I just started on a few weeks ago) has just been a cluster. What you're saying here is true in theory, but what you're not telling people is how the community is about as close to the attitude of npm as you can get on the server side. hundreds of gems on your typical application, many of which are used in 1 or 2 places, helping avoid a grand total of less than 5 lines of code. Then there's the ratwheel you opt into with rails. Every single damned time I find myself having to manually patch libraries to get it working properly. I even once had to track down an old Ubuntu image of a version that had EoL'd 5 years prior and THEN had to manually patch a few C dependencies just to get it to build and run. Don't even get me started on wkhtmltopdf, fuck that dependency. If you use that in your RoR project, fuck you. ^ that's only partially meant to be humourous. My experience is that developers suggest RoR then run off into the sunset on their new project, leaving companies not understanding that they're now on a ratwheel of maintenance and upgrades until it's so bad only someone such as myself even has the skillset necessary to pick up the pieces. Contrast this with asp.net core. Each LTS version is supported for 2 years (which is too short imo), but more importantly, you can install the EOL versions just fine. I would never recommend RoR over asp.net core (asp.net 6+ ... LTS only) because developer productivity isn't worth the maintenance cost.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  .NET's LTS releases are supported for 3 years and STS are supported for 18 months. I wish LTS support was 5 years, it seems like ecosystem has matured enough post-going-OSS-wild-ride starting with .NET 6 release and is ready for such a support timeframe. Or at least they could have every other LTS be ELTS? Also, I do wonder if RoRs perceived productivity is by inertia? I have a hard time believing you can top the productivity of quick scaffolding for back-end you get circa .NET7-8?
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    you're right, looking closer I got my wires crossed. non-LTS is 2 years, LTS is 3 years https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/d... imo, short term RoR will beat the pants off asp.net core in terms of developer productivity. mid to long term asp.net core wins hands down in terms of developer productivity. I don't think the RoR productivity story is fake, but I do think it's not worth the long term maintenance costs.
JohnBooty 3y ago
it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one Totally agree! Developers tend to really undervalue this aspect of RoR. In addition to easier onboarding, it greatly reduces bikeshedding. MVC maybe isn't the best paradigm for everything, but it's good enough for most things.
- mooreds 3y ago
  > Developers tend to really undervalue this aspect of RoR. I agree! I think maybe because the consistency only shows its value: * over years * in its absence (on other projects which aren't using rails) Which means it is easy to miss. I see the same thing with spring. Having constraints helps free you up to solve different kinds of problems. I lived through the "let's define everything from the ground up, picking all our libraries, etc" phase of Java (in the early 2000s; I remember Tapestry and Wicket and Struts and Expresso and XMLC). Would prefer to not do that again. But coalescing on a particular framework is something that a community has to arrive at together. While I think that JavaScript, for example, would benefit from this, I don't know how to encourage it (other than by leaving comments on HN, maybe :) ). And don't think that coalescing means there are no other frameworks. Java has a number, and Ruby does too (trailblazer is a rails++ , Hanami is a rethinking of MVC, Sinatra is like flask). But having one big player makes it easier to focus on higher order solutions.
qudat 3y ago
> What I also loved is that he mentioned that if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one Which is funny because uncle bob cites this as a major downside to architecting code.

Andugal 3y ago

Honeypot documentaries are really good ! I highly recommend them.

dorianmariefr 3y ago

Watched it and loved it

Towaway69 3y ago

Two figures that inspired me were missing, why the lucky stiff and Ryan Bates from railcasts fame. Otherwise great docu with DHH "f*uk you" slide which does give an insight into successful open source projects.

brightball 3y ago
Ryan Bates is a legend
- Towaway69 3y ago
  Ryan did so much for the rails community and all because of the joy for RoR. Unfortunately iirc Ryan suffered a burnout and had a lengthy break. I hope all that is better now.
  - rbates 3y ago
    All is better. I still plan to blog about the burnout.
    - Towaway69 3y ago
      Great to hear and please blog about it - folks need to be aware of the dangers of burnout. Unfortunately having folks around me that had burnout helped me to avoid one myself.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  Indeed. Also, kudos to Chris Oliver for taking up the mantle. https://github.com/excid3 https://github.com/excid3
  - Lio 3y ago
    Definitely! Chris's stuff is great. The Ruby on Rails community struck me as different back in the day in how fun it was. It's hard to explain but coming from a Java background the community seemed to be full of interesting and engaging characters. Some people don't really appreciate that and prefer things to be very dry but I loved it. I'd like to shout out to Ryan Bates, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Zed Shaw, _why, Jason Seifer, Gregg Pollack, Sandi Metz, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Yehuda Katz, Dr Nic, Tenderlove and a whole heap more. Thanks everyone, you've made it a very entertaining journey.

aczerepinski 3y ago

Well done. One thing that struck me is how young the framework is in the big scheme of things. When I first got into programming around 10 years ago, people were already writing articles about how Rails was near obsolete so without giving it much thought I assumed it was from… maybe the early 90s?

AlchemistCamp 3y ago

One of my biggest mistakes as a dev was not really learning Rails until 2015. I just didn’t know how much faster building web apps could be.

CPLX 3y ago
Yeah me too. I am still sad thinking about the number of hours I spend messing with python environments and versions because I was told it was the “quick and easy” option for solving this or that small problem.* Also worth mentioning Michael Hart’s intro course, which is a really shockingly well done way to ramp up from absolute zero, even for someone with very little code experience. * Which, in fairness, it mostly is. But also meh.
- silent_cal 3y ago
  Were you using Django?
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  His book is what got me up to speed in 2015. I was visiting Chiang Mai and binged through the whole thing over a few days and then spent the next week cloning various personal projects I'd written with JS backends. In under two weeks of opening Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, I was already more productive with RoR than with the stack I'd been using professionally for 3+ years.
MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
Same. I spent so long building Django apps and trying to solve problems that StackOverflow told me were inherently difficult, only to find out that Rails has built-in solutions. This isn’t even a criticism of Django; the things that Django does, it does very well. But there are a lot of things that it doesn’t do that a mature web app will eventually need to handle.
- windowshopping 3y ago
  My biggest issue with rails is that the convention it forces you into feels like it's not really a one-size-fits-all solution. I typically build sites that are a one-page or 2-3 page JS app running on an API, as opposed to the more traditional idea of backend paths that return html views. And it seemed like rails wasn't well-suited to that, which was why I didn't stick with it.

hnarayanan 3y ago

This was so fun to watch. It’s great to see people find their calling and do great work and change the world for the better along the way.

berkes 3y ago

> if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. I used to love this, untill I started to hate it. I am convinced this is a major contributor to why so many Rails apps turn into an unmaintainable mess over years. Who measures onboarding in hours? It's fine if it takes a day or two to understand the domain. And the framework. And how they tie together. Talking about the domain: Rails puts "the plumbing" up front. Its how it achieves this consistency. My app is never about "models" or "http" or "databases". My app is about medicine-journals. Or loan-request-management. Or CRM. Rails makes itself important, at the cost of my domain. Rails' opinionatedness makes it so that this is hewn in stone. Its MVC is a given - and that's fine - major architectures should probably be dictated by the framework. But it's ORM - ActiveRecord also is a given. And that's not fine because AR (as an architecture and as how Rails implements it) is very unfit for a large category of applications. It's virtually impossible to swap AR out for anything else. Same with templates/views, JS, Caching, and many more: you can -in theory- replace them with a drop-in alternative. But you cannot -not even in theory- replace them with something that has an entirely different architecture or concept. This makes Rails not Omakase, but actually McDonalds: wherever in the world you come, you know exeactly what to expect, but it also makes boring and bland: no-one eats 7days/week McD. This makes all Rails apps look alike. Despite the fact that not one of the apps that "we" are building is alike another. Domain. Team. Project Planning. Combine any of them and the projects demand different things, but with Rails you are out of luck. Regardless if you build the next fintech platform with a team of 120 senior devs over 6 years, or you hack your "marketplace for coffeelovers" over the weekends alone: you get The Rails Way. One of those might be a perfect fit. But it's impossible they all are. Each team gets the same "menu". And in many cases it simply won't fit.

jupp0r 3y ago
I couldn't agree more. There is also a technology aspect to it. Rails is objectively veeeeeery slow. Concurrency support is nonexistent. This is not a good fit for all problems. It also to some degree prevents you from breaking out the parts that would benefit from a different language into their own services (Rails needs to call them, but it's really not good at IO).

Alifatisk 3y ago

Sounds like from the comments that Rails is gaining a little bit more popularity again instead of being known as the boring robust framework

lagniappe 3y ago
I probably won't use it again in any projects, but I liked the video because of nostalgia. Rails is a memory of a fun and scrappier me, a different time, appropriate in its own light for my path at the time.
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago
  After doing lots of Node and Go I've recently come back to Rails and, no joke, it's about 5x faster in development for me. So many niceties. Using Prisma I had a 25 line method (and no real models) and that went down to 3 lines in Rails. It's just a night and day difference. I won't leave Rails again.
  - swlkr 3y ago
    Rails really is the premiere framework for web development speed
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    I couldn't have said it better, its impressive how much you are able to do through Rails in such a short time.
- Vayl 3y ago
  Why wouldn't you use it again and what would you use instead?
  - mplewis 3y ago
    Governance seems more invested in making ideological changes (dropping Webpacker, TypeScript, breaking changes between versions that add busywork but no value) than building the community and expanding reach. DHH continues to push poor technical decisions and alienate contributors by taking weird political stands. As someone who’s taken multiple projects to production in Rails and generally loves Ruby, these days I prefer to start new projects in full-stack TypeScript. RedwoodJS has been quite good.

0xferruccio 3y ago

Really amazing documentary! Been using Rails for the last couple of years and it’s just so productive for a small team to build product and follow well established patterns in building business logic. I’d recommend to those interested in seeing how a real Rails app is structured to look at the Jumpstart codebase as it’s a great resource on how to structure things https://jumpstartrails.com/ https://jumpstartrails.com/ As an alternative Bullet Train is pretty good, even though it adds a lot of bespoke libraries that aren’t the “Rails way” https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/

adrianlmm 3y ago

I saw it and I don't think it make it any justice, Ruby on Rails changed the paradigm of creating web applications with routes instead of files (like PHP, JSP and Webforms did) with the MVC pattern that now is present in every respectable web framework and the documentary doesn't tell that. It was enjoyable though.

steve1977 3y ago
MVC was already used in frameworks like WebObjects for example (and maybe others) quite a while before Ruby on Rails was born.
- cooljacob204 3y ago
  Sure but I think the point is Rails popularized it.
  - runjake 3y ago
    MVC was popular before Rails. Rails certainly introduced MVC to a lot of new people, though.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    It probably made it more available to the masses (as WebObjects was not free and license costs where in the region of a car at some point)
stevoski 3y ago
Struts was a popular Java MVC framework in the early 2000’s and was pre-Rails. I kind of feel bad mentioning Struts and Rails in the same sentence, though, as Rails did much more than Struts.
- cromulent 3y ago
  I do seem to remember DHH complaining about "XML pushups" when Rails was released, and knowing what he meant from Struts.

lagniappe 3y ago

sad to see _why the lucky stiff left out, but I suppose it is what he'd have wanted.

chris_st 3y ago
Don't remember _why doing any Rails development -- he was really key in Ruby land, but did his own (super-minimal) web thing called Camping. Anything I'm forgetting that he did with/for Rails?
vario 3y ago
his 'artsyness' was the main reason I avoided learning Ruby for years-- wrongly thinking people who code in Ruby speak like him. I know this is a possibly unpopular opinion but I don't think one should glorify a sophomoric book as a key Ruby book-- there are others that deserve that title, PickAxe is close, but I'd have liked a book like Whittaker's "C#, Player Guide" for Ruby.
- sleight42 3y ago
  Perhaps Ruby isn't for you then? Matz's intent was and has been to bring joy and delight to developers, with the odd combination of PERL, LISP, and Smalltalk as his inspirations. Joy and delight don't necessarily equate with "most practical". But joy and delight are wonderful and healthful qualities to cultivate for a good life! _why embodied much of the spirit of the (at least earlier) Ruby community. We were software developer immigrants, many coming from prescriptive verbose technologies (I'm looking at you, Java!). We were eager for novel ways of expressing our ideas. Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities are, as far as I know, still all but unmatched beyond perhaps Smalltalk itself (and IO, which AFAIK no one uses seriously). _why's playfulness captured all of this in elegant and sometimes bizarre but often artistic expressions in his projects and code. I will never regret or apologize for the Ruby community's appreciation for the Poignant Guide. And, _why, wherever you are and whoever you are, thanks.
  - vario 3y ago
    [flagged]

LeonidBugaev 3y ago

What I really appreciate about Rails, is the strong vision, and not becoming another bloated framework for building "enterprise grade" applications. This is a 20-year-old framework, which does not afraid to radically change with time, and still being seen as Punk compared to rest It was so heartwarming to remember my Rails story, its been 20 years ago since I started using it! https://twitter.com/buger/status/1723040883325460818 https://twitter.com/buger/status/1723040883325460818

dmix 3y ago

Funny they show pictures of Berlin overlayed with "Toronto" at @22:16, I guess they meant to say Tobias moved from Germany->Canada but it made me ???.

bewuethr 3y ago
And in the shot before that, Chicago!

siva7 3y ago

There are so many legends from the early rails days that paved the way to how we develop modern web apps. I would go as far to say that in web development there is a time before and after rails emerged.

magicmicah85 3y ago

Going to have to watch this later today. I've messed with so many frameworks in the past - Laravel, ExpressJS, MeteorJS, Django, Flask, etc. All of them have their benefits and drawbacks and I've been at different knowledge levels when I've tried them all but I've always tried tutorials, done my own thing and given up. Three days ago I started using rails and I just flew through the weekend to get a MVP setup to show a coworker. Rails just made it easy to focus on what my app needs to do, not how my app needs to be implemented. I can finally see why people love it so much.

SkyPuncher 3y ago
I've been a Rails dev for a long time. I've tried a bunch of things and keep coming back to it for the same reasons as you. I'm incredibly productive in it. For the longest time, my primary complaint has been a lack of documentation/conflicting information when you break from convention. It can be extremely challenging to find/understand the "blessed" way of doing things. Thankfully, ChatGPT is extremely good at providing a starting point for this stuff.
- theonething 3y ago
  Could you give an example of how ChatGPT helped you specifically with Rails?
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    The one that I use it the most for is writing ActiveMigrations while integrating with some of Postgres features. There's a lot of settings that get pass-thru to the DB, but aren't clearly documented. I know it's possible, I just can't remember the syntax. Same thing with some of the more advanced Model relationships. I just don't write _that_ many relationships, so I tend to forget how Rails wants certain things defined. Since a lot of things rely on config, rather than "normal" runtime code, it can be frustrating to debug. ChatGPT just gets me to the right answer. --- It's also pretty useful at gut checking DB design. There's been a few times where it's suggested a different approach than what I expected and I've preferred it's suggestions.

impish9208 3y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222535

jslakro 3y ago
played the HN lottery
- impish9208 3y ago
  Yeah, a little frustrating. I think this is the second or third time that I get downvoted for pointing out a dupe of my submission.
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    I downvoted this one because your thread had literally zero value to me (or any of us) as a reader. It had zero comments and it contained the exact same link as our current thread.

emmet 3y ago

Haven't touched rails in several years, but now I need to get an idea to get back into it!

deleted 3y ago

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game_the0ry 3y ago

I tried to like ruby and rails, but when I tried to grok the language, I found it more difficult to follow than python + js (my daily drivers). Did anyone else feel the same way? I kind of want to give it another chance bc I have some side projects that I want to try out, but I find django/python and next/react easier to grok. Maybe I should try harder? FWIW, I also want to pick up good practices when it comes to engineering a back end, and the good ex-rails engineers I know tend to be really good in general.

brightball 3y ago
When I first started with Rails on a project I took over in 2012 I really disliked it. Today it’s something I repeatedly try to tell everybody about. It’s just so productive.
samtechie 3y ago
Interestingly, for me it is the exact opposite, I tried Django/Python and it's more difficult for me to grok. Somehow I just find Rails easier and more straightforward.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  I think its bc I just know python better. When I look at ruby code, especially with symbols, I can't really tell what's going on the same way I can with python. I get the impression python is more simple while ruby is more powerful (featurefull) + more object oriented.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Yeah, probably. I just moved from Ruby to Python and I'm not exactly loving Python. But, I'm quite sure it's just that I'm not used to Python yet. I think one thing is true -- Ruby gives you lots of different ways to do things. And it can be really terse sometimes, if you want it to be. Some Ruby devs IMO should learn to favor readability over terseness. Overall though, Ruby is my favorite language and IMO can be very beautiful. I don't think anybody would call Python beautiful. (Lots of great things about it though, nice language and ecosystem... no hate)

scop 3y ago

I’m a longtime PHP/JS dev who recently decided to give Ruby and Rails a look given its influence on Laravel. The first thing I did was read the Rails Doctrine and, while I appreciated most of it, I thought "The Principle of The Bigger Smile" and DHH’s comments re Ruby's elegance were one self-indulgent-bridge too far. Back to the jaded PHP cave I go... That was until I learned that in Ruby: `someObj.some_var = 'hello'` Is syntactic sugar for: `someObj.some_var=('hello')` That made me smile. I have never smiled like that about a programming language. It literally gave me joy. I’ll be honest I have some trepidation devoting my time now to something “old”, but on the flip side my career is in PHP so what the hell am I talking about “old” for.

corytheboyd 3y ago
You’re going to love writing tests for Ruby! Nearly everything is a message send, which works insanely well with testing libraries. It’s so damn easy and clean to reach meaningful test coverage in Ruby where it feels like a chore in other languages

dividedbyzero 3y ago

I remember fondly when RoR was the hottest thing, so elegant and easy to understand, but I haven't touched it in ages. Is it still good compared to the more up-to-date stuff? Is it still relevant?

block_dagger 3y ago
Absolutely! I switched from PHP to Rails in 2008 and I've been able to upgrade all of the relevant projects to modern 7.1. Lots of changes/maturation along the way, but all in the right direction. Still best web framework for fast prototyping in 2023. I use Rails every day. Not the best for high concurrency or system tasks, but great for expressing maintainable business logic and working on web apps in teams.
clivestaples 3y ago
Yes. Hotwire is an incredible productivity booster. There can be some lag on waiting for the server to respond in some scenarios but I just drop into Stimulus and perform some manual "optimistic" UI updates -- usually in a just a few lines. I create all my new Rails projects with Tailwind and esbuild and have had no issues whatsoever. The new authentication stuff (generates_token...) is also a huge time saver.

sigzero 3y ago

They was a really good watch. The gentlemen in the video were and are very passionate about Rails.

conductr 3y ago
Early on, these guys had blogs and it was some of the only content you could find on Rails. The documentation was pretty much nonexistent and not very easy to grasp for newcomers. This was before railscasts even hit the scene but these guys, and a very few others, were like disciples spreading the word. I even remember at around that time there was a fundraiser specifically to hire someone to write better docs. I think it was some third party response to all the forums where people had been lamenting the desire for better docs. This was before go fund me and kickstarter so itself was a little unusual at the time.

timetraveller26 3y ago

By now I have watched many programming documentaries by Honeypot and I can't recommend them enough. They have documentaries of ue, React, GraphQL, Ember and some more.

battery_glasses 3y ago

I worked on a very large production rails app from 2015-2019 and came away loving Rails and hating Ruby. Give me Rails in TS or Go and I couldn't think of any reason to ever use anything else for a web app backend. The Rails Console has to be one of the greatest productivity enhancers I've ever come across.

corytheboyd 3y ago
I’d love to see a Go REPL that can do nearly as many things as you can do with a Ruby REPL. It’s just not really possible I think. It could be doable with TS with the existing node REPL, but Ruby really is a huge driver behind why Rails console is as useful as it is.

RENDYHerdiyana 3y ago

Hig and low

signatureMove 3y ago

Great story. I knew a bit about Rails beforehand but it's really nice to see the people involved with its growth.

wutwutwat 3y ago

This doc and the Elixir doc don't really capture much imo. They are short and hardly get the origin stories told before ending. There isn't much to get excited about before they are over, and they feel kinda like they exist to stroke the egos of those appearing in the film, and not so much to show the community or more importantly the people outside of the community, how awesome these things are. Give me a 1.5 hour long doc on elixir and rails and get past the patting each other on the backs part and into the struggles over the years, switch back and forth between different uses at different shops, etc. Essentially, steal the format of Indie Game The Movie and I'll be more into these because I want there to be great docs about software

sauercrowd 3y ago
very different from my perception - from unusual davids approach was to how the rails team formed through Toby and the others, merging with that other frameworks... so many small bits of history that are hard to digg up anywhere I wouldn't mind it being longer but it's great they were able to put it together

Vojin 3y ago

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Vojin 3y ago

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