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Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

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41–50 of 189 posts

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#41
post #39

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

All you need is one weekend to really learn a useful amount of Node and React. You can’t spare it?

I personally like Ruby better than Node and Svelte better than React.

So that weekend could rabbit hole into complexity figuring out which framework to use.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#43
post #39

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

All you need is one weekend to really learn a useful amount of Node and React. You can’t spare it?

Why bother? I work on a very UI-heavy interactive app (it's a gantt chart) for work and therefore have been doing react daily for 1.5 years. React is probably making life a little easier here, and I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. If I didn't love my team so much I would be looking for a job working on a more classic web app in Rails. And when I profess my appreciation for Rails, I could just as easily be talking about Django, Phoenix, or any other _opinionated_ backend framework. [edited for spelling]

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you knew Ruby and not the Python, the whole scenario would have been flipped.

> If you knew Ruby and not the Python, the whole scenario would have been flipped. That's why popularity matters. The odds that any random kid already has experience with Python are far greater than him knowing Ruby.

This was the argument for php in 2010.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#45
Serverless has its place. I am not sure if I'd chose to build a shopping cart on Serverless just yet (Next.js' recent forays notwithstanding), but for something that is stateless (like content distribution, capturing metrics and logs, serving static webpages)...oh, is it a breeze.

That said, I see many promising upstarts and incumbents in the space trying to make stateful Serverless easier by the day. Things can only improve and improve they will. I'm bullish.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#46

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

Replace Rails with Django and this comment seems to hold true for many in the Django community. Boring can be good.

Boring tech is great if your primary concern is writing business logic. Ideally, this should always be true, but of course the reality is that people's jobs often have them working on products they don't really care for. And of course, it's easy to get distracted by tech anyway. Experience also comes into play when it comes to loving "boring" tech—it took my around a decade before I was sufficiently jaded that almost all I want to do is write actual business logic. I still love refactoring, though :)

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#47
I'm looking at Blazor/wasm nowadays and it's causing me an awful lot of nostalgia when I think back to the early days of Rails (if '08 can be called early days per-se), because of the shit show back then with various tech stacks and the grunt work required to get a site up with some DB backed data source and whatnot.

And I feel like today we are back to some kind of a point of having to shoehorn FE/BE tech together unless we use some isomorphic approach which, predominantly, forces the use of JS.

And I remember DHH commenting on this regarding Java and saying something to the tune of "Why would I write Java when Ruby is so much better?". Back then I thought such a statement was too indignant, like someone getting on their high horse about a particular kind of building material that is better above all else. But nowadays, I see the wisdom behind it all the same.

I just want simple bloody tech that treats the browser as a layout and input handling engine and lets me write code in any language I see fit, whether it's Ruby, F#, C#, Clojure, whatever. I'm hoping Blazor or something like it can deliver on that vision.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#48
post #37
post #25

Serverless for web apps have one big issues. The cold starts of lambda(s) can be over .5-1 seconds at peek times (us-east-1) any way.

Thete are multiple solutions to that problem. 1. API Gateway and AppSync integrate directly with many other AWS services, no Lambdas needed, and thus no cold-starts. 2. Lambda has provisioned capacity. 3. Other cloud providers like Cloudflare offer FaaS without cold-starts.

> 2. Lambda has provisioned capacity.

I know little about lambda. Provisioned capacity, as in an instance running 24/7? Like a server?

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#49
post #39

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

All you need is one weekend to really learn a useful amount of Node and React. You can’t spare it?

What's the benefit of moving from Rails to Node and React productivity-wise? On the backend side, Rails comes with an ORM, authentication, templating system and many more out of the box, while on Node you'll need to mix and match a bunch of 3rd party libs or roll your own, which might be a good thing depending on your priorities but certainly kills productivity. On the frontend side, you can always use react with rails backend, but developing traditional template-based ui is usually faster than developing a react app and you can take advantage of rails templating/rendering feature to speed up development.
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