There is a surprisingly small amount of senior rails developers. Many who learned it when it was cool, have moved on. There are so many legit companies making tons of money on Rails stacks with 0 intention on leaving. The market is excellent for rails developers and likely will be for the foreseeable future.
Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
91–100 of 160 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#92I think it depends on the region. I started a project in Rails, and when I tried to hire people to help I found out there are very few people in my city who know anything about Rails. It's all Python and Java here. So I'd recommend to look for job ads on local platforms and check if companies are looking for rails devs.
But hiring engineers isn't constrained by region or location so this feels like an odd argument to me. Rails has been around long enough that there's surely no shortage of junior to very very senior engineers that will write code for you from wherever they happen to live.
I'm good enough at English, and I've learned to collaborate somewhat effectively remotely, but if given the choice, I still prefer collaborating with people in person and speaking my native language.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#93We're still starting new greenfield projects in Rails every week, and I still believe it's the best foundation for SaaS products. It's great for developer speed and efficiency, the ecosystem of gems is amazing, and we've been able to scale every project we've needed to. We're incorporating React and GraphQL more these days for complex components and APIs but they pair nicely with Rails.
I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.
A Go monolith would be just as hard to maintain as an RoR monolith. This is not a shortcoming of the framework.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#94For people in this thread comparing _Rails_ with _Go_ can you please help me understand something about Go: Is it a language that also has in std/core library web framework like support? Like PHP? I ask as I dont understand why people say drop Rails and learn Go. And I am looking to learn a new language along with Ruby and Elixir. Why is Go compared with Rails and not with Ruby? If Go does not include a default suppo…
you can go quite far with golang without needing any other library/framework with just std library which means less dependencies and lesser things to worry about in case of maintaining your code base, upgrading it with newere go version and ease of operation(since it is single executable).
Some of the basic things that you need that don't require frameworks are
1. http/https
2. authentication
3. sending mails
4. templating(it isn't powerful but you get by)
5. background jobs
6. date/time etc.
I am not familiar with ruby but my understanding is you don't get these out of the box you will need framework like rails for it. How easy/difficult it is to upgrade rails? for golang if you are sticking to stdlib it is trivial. If it is easy to upgrade/maintain/operate rails and you are familiar with it than don't switch.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#95Yes! Ruby on Rails remains relevant, so long as you use it for projects where it makes sense.
Rails was originally released in 2004. Since then, it has been used to build a wide range of different websites and applications. Some of the most well-known sites built using Rails are Github and Airbnb, which is why many people think of Rails when they think of web development. While it has lost some popularity in recent years, as other frameworks and languages have become more mainstream, Rails is still very much alive and kicking.
In fact, in 2018, Rails was the 7th most commonly used framework among all developers according to Stack Overflow's annual developer survey. This survey included over 100,000 responses from software developers representing over 150 countries. It showed that about 30 percent of those surveyed had used Rails "in their careers" or "currently use."
The main question you should ask yourself when considering whether or not to use Rails is whether or not you can use another tool that would be better suited for your project. If you're looking to build a website with a lot of dynamic functionality that needs to be delivered at lightning speed, then Rails could definitely be your best option.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#96Don't think so it is dead rather a mature and proven technology. The impact of Rails is huge and almost every other web framework has embraced parts of it.
But having worked with Rails code base, it becomes a guess work in a text editor to know what you're getting in a method. The duck typing makes impossible to be sure for text editors unless you resort to some sort of type hinting and that's not Rails's fault, that's ruby.
In 2022, given among all the choices, I'd probably go to either deno + Typescript or golang.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#97At this point I think it is worthwhile to contrast Ruby against Rails. Ruby has fallen behind, if you want great meta programming, you can get all the joy, plus much better speed, by using something like Clojure. That also gives you access to the vast ecosystem of Java libraries.
But Rails is a different story. For jumpstarting a greenfield API or CRUD app, there is nothing quite as good as Rails. Django and Symfony and other frameworks have tried to imitate Rails, but Rails is still way out in front, with better tools, and the marriage of Rails tools with Ruby's advanced meta-programming is something difficult to replicate elsewhere.
If your company needs a custom CRM or CMS, Rails remains the best starting place.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#98No, I just accepted a Rails job offer a while ago.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#99We're still starting new greenfield projects in Rails every week, and I still believe it's the best foundation for SaaS products. It's great for developer speed and efficiency, the ecosystem of gems is amazing, and we've been able to scale every project we've needed to. We're incorporating React and GraphQL more these days for complex components and APIs but they pair nicely with Rails.
I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.
I've been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it.
One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors were of course not consistent across all of the microservices, not because of lack of agreement, but because new ideas and ways to "do it better" showed up all the time.
Some of these "services" needed translations (for emails, hooks, and some html responses) so a custom "very simple" translation system was invented.
It became an infinite mesh of proxy services on top of proxy services on top of proxy services on top of kubernetes.... and at the end of the day, guess what was paying the bills? guess what still had all the business logic and was the source of truth?
The Rails application.
if just 10% of the effort were put on improving the existing Rails application, all the Go microservices crazynes that was going on at this place would have been avoided.
Do you know why it went everything that way? Because management decided that if they blocked people from using Go then people would leave the company. I was one of the managers there, and pretty opposed to this as you can notice.
But I think this is a huge reality around here. People want to play with new shiny, without even thinking of the drawbacks or if they do have a concurrency or raw cpu performance in their application.
People want to make a CV in what they want to use in their next job. And Rails is not fashionable anymore so "the monolith is bad" and "Go microservices" are good. You're not google 99% of the time.
Thankfully I left all that madness and now I'm in a more sane (although "not so cool" technologically) place where we focus on shipping product and keeping things maintainable, robust and secure.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#100Nope. Not dead.
I'm building Avo to help developers ship apps faster than ever. Avo is to Rails what Rails is to web development.