It's been interesting looking into their "leaked" source to see how the application is architected. It's surprisingly accessible given the overall size.
Do you have a link? Sounds interesting
Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
31–40 of 332 posts
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#32GitHub running off the main branch is fascinating, and initially sounds mad, but makes so much sense. Assuming they have very high test coverage, running against mainline Rails isn't really any different to having the fork they had before, but they have more influence on future development. It must also be a massive boon for the Rails ecosystem to have such a large property running off the head. Doesn't anyone know o…
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard, since Django only has one dependency - Django itself (NodeJS developers weep). Is rails the same way dependency wise?
Wait is this true? Doesn’t it also use SQLAlchemy at least? Which then likely has its own dependencies? I’d be really surprised if Django had no dependencies at all.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#33GitHub running off the main branch is fascinating, and initially sounds mad, but makes so much sense. Assuming they have very high test coverage, running against mainline Rails isn't really any different to having the fork they had before, but they have more influence on future development. It must also be a massive boon for the Rails ecosystem to have such a large property running off the head. Doesn't anyone know o…
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard, since Django only has one dependency - Django itself (NodeJS developers weep). Is rails the same way dependency wise?
Ah, NodeJs developers are fine with a single dependency too. As long as that dependency is NPM.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#34Github is one of the few webapps where I can feel daily that the framework used isn't enough. So many things get out of sync/not up to date, which are fixed by refreshing the page.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard, since Django only has one dependency - Django itself (NodeJS developers weep). Is rails the same way dependency wise?
Wait is this true? Doesn’t it also use SQLAlchemy at least? Which then likely has its own dependencies? I’d be really surprised if Django had no dependencies at all.
I don’t think Django uses SQLAlchemy. It has its own ORM which is damn good, but you can also use SWLAlchemy instead of that if you want.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#36Good post and an interesting glimpse into the behind-the-scenes efforts that goes into maintaining Github. I cannot agree with the "Should I do it too?" section. It probably works very well for an org as large and dedicated as Github, it very likely makes a lot of sense for what they do at the scale they do it at. For most of us that are consumers of technologies and frameworks, treating the framework as an extension…
I absolutely agree that it's very rare for a non-software engineering organisation to care one bit about its tech stack, at least outside of the IT departments. As long as things work reasonably well at a reasonable cost, the organisation will likely be happy about it. This is partly because IT (this includes software development) is seen as an expense center which provides a support function, akin to HR. Maybe some people will think this is silly, especially in companies where every employee spend all of their working time on some sort of digital device, but that's the reality that I have spent the past two decades working within, and I don't particularly mind it.
I'm curious as to why you would disagree with what Adam Hess writes about handling updates though. To me he respectfully outlines that GitHub has engineering capabilities that allow them to update their Ruby on Rails weekly, and that it's a good idea to do so, if you can. I can follow you as far as how the application stack isn't the core business in the sort of organisations you and I seem to work for, and weekly updates likely shouldn't be your goal, but I do think that you should allocate the resources needed to keep things relatively up-to-date.
I'll give you an example of how I don't follow my own advice. We have what has developed into an important asset management system that we build in-house, which due to a lack of updates being prioritized now cannot be build on the LTS version of it's core tech. This isn't a major problem today, because it's on an internal system on a virtual network which is heavily protected, but it's also gotten to the point where it will likely need one or two people to work full time for a week to a month to get it updated. Doing that might actually be cheaper than having kept it sort of up-to-date, maybe with quarterly or even yearly updates, but if we couldn't get those prioritized, how do you think we're going to get a week-month for updates prioritized? :p
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard, since Django only has one dependency - Django itself (NodeJS developers weep). Is rails the same way dependency wise?
Wait is this true? Doesn’t it also use SQLAlchemy at least? Which then likely has its own dependencies? I’d be really surprised if Django had no dependencies at all.
django 4.2 has two dependencies: asgiref and sqlparse. other than that, none.
django does not use sqlalchemy as its ORM, it has its own system (which i prefer!).
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#38I absolutely love Rails. I'll always remember back in 2010 catching the train to Waterloo station in London and seeing a huge sign overlooking the train tracks that read something like "We Need Rails Developers". Rails was such a huge part of my professional career. Now, 13 years later and I'm deep in the JavaScript ecosystem and have been for 8 years. The most exciting thing to come out of this ecosystem recently is…
Is that ad placement a genius piece of guerrilla marketing, or a recipe for total confusion, among the general population at least? Perhaps both.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#39Github is one of the few webapps where I can feel daily that the framework used isn't enough. So many things get out of sync/not up to date, which are fixed by refreshing the page.
Yes, just seen it yesterday. However, this is perhaps not of Github origins. Even when you use the recommended interface to git - the command line - it's only as up-to date as you've entered the last command for - or pressing F5 in gitk.
Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
#40GitHub running off the main branch is fascinating, and initially sounds mad, but makes so much sense. Assuming they have very high test coverage, running against mainline Rails isn't really any different to having the fork they had before, but they have more influence on future development. It must also be a massive boon for the Rails ecosystem to have such a large property running off the head. Doesn't anyone know o…
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard, since Django only has one dependency - Django itself (NodeJS developers weep). Is rails the same way dependency wise?
That's not correct. Django isn't independent, depends on lot many packages but that's not the issue. Issue is the frameworks own Interface:
Existing Interface getting removed OR behavior or defaults changing for an already existing Interface.
That's usually the upgrades are about.