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Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

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Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#81

Post by rabidferret »

steveklabnik wrote: post #79
kbenson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that particular type of patronage is fairly uncommon, but popular projects might have a couple people like that each. That's still a very low number if I'm correct. I know sometimes there are foundations for languages that aggregate donations and fund grants to do specific work (e.g. part of the The Perl Foundation's function, I believe). I think the majority of companies that give back do so through develope…

There is no legal entity, he just means the contributors group. The GitHub organization. We may eventually start a foundation, but that’s a huge “may”.

Yeah, calling it "The Rust organization" was probably a mistake, as it can be confused for something more official than the nebulous non-official entity that I'm referring to

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#82

Post by rabidferret »

kbenson wrote: post #78
misterdoubt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article seems to disagree with your point about open source funding: > Right now my goal is to get a handful of medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. If you work for a company that might be interested in helping sponsor me, please reach out. If that's a financially viable proposition, that speaks well of large companies supporting individuals on open source projects, no?

I think that particular type of patronage is fairly uncommon, but popular projects might have a couple people like that each. That's still a very low number if I'm correct. I know sometimes there are foundations for languages that aggregate donations and fund grants to do specific work (e.g. part of the The Perl Foundation's function, I believe). I think the majority of companies that give back do so through develope…

Yeah, it's a problematic model if we were to look at it as a solution to open source funding. It requires you to already be contributing heavily to a significant enough project that you'd be able to get these grants in the first place. Being able to get there without being paid along the way is a position of extreme privilege that not many have.

I spent a lot of time wrestling with the decision to even try this at all ("is it fair for me to do this when so many others can't?" and "will folks just think I'm abusing my position" are both things I had to come to terms with).

That said, if we do a better job of breaking down barriers to getting into that position in the first place, it's not a terrible model to start with. Getting a enough large grants to fully cover a salary from various companies a year is much more feasible than getting enough tens of thousands of individuals to contribute.

Working with these shorter sponsorships vs a full time employer also just feels more like the kind of open source work that got me wanting to do it full time. It lets me be much more flexible on when/what I work on (within reason, there are expectations on what "full time on crates.io/Rust" means). It's also helps to avoid situations where the employer is upset because you're spending time on a feature/bug/whatever that is important to the ecosystem but not directly useful to the company (e.g. working on a PG specific feature in Rails while employed by a company that uses MySQL)

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#83

Post by rabidferret »

freehunter wrote: post #2

I’ve seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they’re very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it’s possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison. I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they…

In case it wasn't clear from the article, I'm moving from contributing to Rails to Rust, not as a user. Most of my contributions to Rails were around Active Record (the ORM), and I got into Rust by creating its most used ORM. My main role in the project right now is co-leading the team responsible for crates.io, the Rust package registry, which is a web application written in Rust.

So all of those things overlap quite a bit (also am I not allowed to expand the scope of things I work on beyond web frameworks? I'm not really sure why they have to overlap at all)

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#84

Post by rabidferret »

gigatexal wrote: post #5

I would have thought rails to golang so I too am surprised. I wish I had millions and could be a patron saint of sorts for people like the author. Open source funding is so broken as the companies that build upon the vast open source and often free software don’t do much in the way of donating or otherwise supporting the companies or individuals behind the projects.

I've never contributed to go in the past, why would I be transitioning to working on go full time?

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#85

Post by spellingbee »

ajmurmann wrote: post #73
zik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the "lot of narratives" you're talking about actually exist. I've never heard anyone from the Go camp say that they want to make the language "small even if it's inconvenient". From a language design point of view I think they're trying to make it small to maximise convenience. Yes, it's a different philosophy to "kitchen sink" languages but that doesn't make it wrong. In fact it's considered a gold sta…

I don't disagree that making the language small is a great goal and makes the language better. I just think that such a language will not appeal to everyone who enjoyed a large language full of syntactic sugar like Ruby. In fact I very much agree with Go's design goals and see lots of problems with Rust's design choices, at least when considering it for "mondain" work like web dev. However, I cannot get myself excite…

Mundane... Not mondain

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#86

Post by grogenaut »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #27
grogenaut wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on windows boxes all the time for go development it works great for that. Docker / Docker machine cause issues, and I can't use HyperV because I also have to be able to run android emulator. However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or a…

Just run a Linux dev VM in VMware. Best of all worlds. You have your Windows gaming PC and you can develop on it in Linux.

done that for years too. file syncing from windows to linux isn't the fastest... the vms are decently fast but not good enough. I also use quad monitors on my windows pc and 7 at work (tho one runs twitch or MLB all day), I hate to say it but the vm feels almost as bad as me using a 13" laptop (or a laptop in general for development without monitor) feels. I just switched my laptop to linux (it's new and it's god awful fast, it was always choking on windows, and it may be because linux isn't speed stepping the cpu constantly). My desktop is generally quite fast but it's a beefy box.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#87

Post by james_s_tayler »

grogenaut wrote: post #86
james_s_tayler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run a Linux dev VM in VMware. Best of all worlds. You have your Windows gaming PC and you can develop on it in Linux.

done that for years too. file syncing from windows to linux isn't the fastest... the vms are decently fast but not good enough. I also use quad monitors on my windows pc and 7 at work (tho one runs twitch or MLB all day), I hate to say it but the vm feels almost as bad as me using a 13" laptop (or a laptop in general for development without monitor) feels. I just switched my laptop to linux (it's new and it's god awf…

I find that if I use VMWare the VM is nice and fast and no problems. If I use VirtualBox the performance isn't fantastic but still workable.

How on earth do you use 7 monitors for work?

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#88

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #34
cocochanel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

I cut my teeth on Ruby and Rails, I've screwed around with Phoenix, and I'm currently infatuated with Rust. Earlier on I thought that, yeah, Rust is a great replacement for C and not something want to write a web app in. So, sure, I've got a bunch of little doodads written in Rust (mostly CLI tools). Now? The fluff I've written in Elixir is getting ported to Rust. The Rust tooling and community are just that good. I'…

Sorry, I don't get your point for deployment. There are complaints you can make fot everything, but deploying an elixir application boils down to compile, upload, start.

Sure, 2 days of work the first time, which is a negligible amount of time for any real world project (otherwise you are on the wrong language). This if you want a good pipeline. Otherwise it's a couple of hours, but even with rails i always invested a couple of days to have a good pipeline.

Doesn't mean rust does not do it better, but it's really not the point for choosing a language over another. In a big project you have a dedicated person. In a medium project, the investment is very small. In a small project, you are better served by prototyping tools (rails)

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