RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel • Hacker News Board

operatingthetan wrote: post #14

dieselgate wrote: post #12

Great perspective! Wasn’t familiar with the beginning history of RailsCasta as I didn’t begin working with the framework until maybe 2014/5. Still a big fan of rails and a good reminder to check out the screencasts again. But my goodness so much has changed in the past 5/10 years (no surprise of course). Just last year I was converting coffeeacript files to es6 in a rails codebase now we’re converting rails to Node.

>now we’re converting rails to Node. Isn't that just a full re-write, or is there a process?

Rails is still used as an orchestration layer but a lot of the effort is migrating to micro front ends using Node. I haven’t worked much/at all on the conversion so unfortunately cannot speak in detail of how Node/Rails interact or how component federation works

Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

#26

Post by chanind » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 1:35 AM UTC

Railscasts taught me so much when I was first learning web development right out of university. I used to watch Railscasts episodes religiously when they came out. I don't know if I would have grown as much as a developer without being exposed to the whole ecosystem of tools and techniques that Railscasts presented - I'd often discover libraries existed that solved problems I would never have known to seek out otherwise. Thank you for the time and effort over the years producing the episodes @rbates! Looking forward to hearing the full story in the next installments!

Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

#27

Post by forgingahead » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 2:16 AM UTC

Echoing others, Ryan and Railscasts (and Asciicasts!) were instrumental in my own Rails and web development journey. When the subscription episodes were introduced, it was a no-brainer to pay for that for myself and for my team.

Obviously it was sad when Ryan had to stop, but it was important he focused on himself. Either way, still grateful for all the helpful content he put out to make us better developers.

In no particular order, some interesting flashbacks to that period of web development:

Billing with Stripe: http://railscasts.com/episodes/288-billing-with-stripe

Upgrading to Rails 4: http://railscasts.com/episodes/415-upgrading-to-rails-4

Facebook Open Graph: http://railscasts.com/episodes/363-facebook-open-graph

PayPal recurring billing: http://railscasts.com/episodes/289-paypal-recurring-billing

PDF with Prawn: http://railscasts.com/episodes/153-pdfs-with-prawn-revised

Thanks for all you did Ryan! Hope you are keeping well.

Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

#28

Post by lukeck » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 2:43 AM UTC

rbates wrote: post #23

Thank you all for the kind comments! The Rails community has always been supportive to me. Even criticisms were done in a constructive manner. I will go into detail on why I stopped RailsCasts in part 3, but I will say it wasn’t because of the community. You all have been awesome.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was working as a C# developer in a big, old, traditional enterprise environment. I had burned out and I was falling out of love with programming.

A friend introduced me to Ruby and I became excited again. Railscasts helped me immensely in being able to very quickly build things. This motivated me to continue and before long I was able to change jobs and start using Ruby and Rails full time.

Thanks.

Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

#29

Post by digianarchist » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

rbates wrote: post #23

Thank you all for the kind comments! The Rails community has always been supportive to me. Even criticisms were done in a constructive manner. I will go into detail on why I stopped RailsCasts in part 3, but I will say it wasn’t because of the community. You all have been awesome.

Railscasts helped me get my first Rails job. Thanks for all you’ve done.

Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

#30

Post by conductr » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 4:21 AM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #17

halfdan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot of pressure to deliver weekly episodes if that was your goal. I think at some point you become unable to reflect that you're approaching burnout and should have taken a break twenty episodes ago.

A lot of people I've known in this space have run into the problem where making content became their job and it meant they weren't doing the "real work" that created fuel for creating the content. That is, the best content came from talking about the challenges and techniques learnt in their "day job" but now their day job was running a screencast/tutorial business.

I always wonder how the Dilbert author keeps up with office memes given he’s not really in corporate America for quite some time