Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 332 posts

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#71

Post by that_guy_iain »

jack_riminton wrote: post #30
samwillis wrote: post #9

GitHub 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…

Exactly, it’s an investment in Rails by tying yourself so closely with it. Contrast to the JS ecosystem where as soon as there’s a disagreement or new idea a new framework is born

Comparing frontend frameworks with backend frameworks seems really odd to me. It takes a lot less time to build a JS framework. They do a lot less. This isn't to say frontend is easier or whatever. But they really do a lot less. That is why they're so many really good frontend frameworks. It's also a lot easier to rewrite your frontend than it is your backend. While backend there is so much to build that you really need to invest in it.

Every backend lanaguage has one or two really good frameworks. Simply because the cost of replacement is so high and the cost of developing a new one is so high, it just makes sense to invest in the one you're using. Sadly, this means just investing in hiring more people and not in actually improving it which GitHub/Microsoft is doing.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#72

Post by that_guy_iain »

wg0 wrote: post #41
samwillis wrote: post #9

GitHub 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 have yet to see a tech stack that's not locked up into a framework version. That's more because of our engineering culture. The cost of NOT upgrading outweighs by a huge margin than keeping building on top. And yes, have seen Django shops locked into 0.9x release patched right into the core and running for a very long time, impossible to upgrade and all the horror stories. EDIT: Added Django

The costs of running of the main branch outweighs the cost of waiting until there is a new release and upgrading then. Even if you're dealing with a stable framework that has good Backwards Compatability.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#73

Post by re-thc »

devjab wrote: post #36
politelemon wrote: post #22

Good 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…

> As long as things work reasonably well at a reasonable cost, the organisation will likely be happy about it.

Or maybe the organization is just uninformed of the issues. Most management of organizations lack a view into 80% of the issues at hand.

> some people will think this is silly

It's sad rather than silly.

Like when I go to a supermarket and can't checkout because the terminals are down... right it's not a core part of the business and just a cost center. So I decide to order online and their checkout form goes into an infinite loop and I give up... they've lost customers.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#74

Post by AeroNotix »

rajamaka wrote: post #60
KyeRussell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Until recently, I was exclusively working with Django for 5+ years. I definitely fell into the trap of making the ORM for granted. Had a brief foray into the JS world and despite plenty of slick-looking projects with fancy pants websites, nothing remotely compares.

What JS based ORMs did you use that you weren't a fan of?

All of them are bad in their own ways. They all fall down in key features, or the non-standard SQL features (hooks, after-save, automatic transactions, etc) all have edge-cases and surprising behaviour.

I have tried a lot and the least worst is Zapatos (and it's not really an ORM) because it at least tries to not paper over SQL and instead just creates a type-safe API for using SQL.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#76

Post by AeroNotix »

dagorenouf wrote: post #61

I built my startup 4 years ago with a combination of react + aws + gatsby + hasura. I thought this would be great for performance and scale. Fast forward to today, I spend at least 2x as much time to code a feature than if I had just stuck with a simple rails stack, and the scale I imagined never happened. Now rebuilding everything with rails so I can ship faster and focus on growing the product, not making engineeri…

Building for scale from day 0 is a recipe for disaster. You should've seen that coming.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#77

Post by re-thc »

wg0 wrote: post #41
samwillis wrote: post #9

GitHub 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 have yet to see a tech stack that's not locked up into a framework version. That's more because of our engineering culture. The cost of NOT upgrading outweighs by a huge margin than keeping building on top. And yes, have seen Django shops locked into 0.9x release patched right into the core and running for a very long time, impossible to upgrade and all the horror stories. EDIT: Added Django

> That's more because of our engineering culture. The cost of NOT upgrading outweighs by a huge margin than keeping building on top.

The cost of not upgrading is always the worst option. It's just that those making the decisions might not have the same stakes. It has nothing to do with technology and happens in every situation.

Often you're just not even aware of what these costs are because you're wired to work around it. It just feels right to continue that workaround including continuing to hire and expand when it reality it's just more overhead.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#78

Post by jeremyjh »

mo_po2 wrote: post #46

Going a bit of topic, Arch Linux does mostly the same, and thanks to it all of its users are direct testers/reporters of unpatched projects, with the exception of a few minor patches related to chore in projects that don't allow to customize it (mostly paths). I guess that this has probably improved the overall health of Linux beyond Arch itself during the last 2 decades for similar reasons to the ones provided in th…

Yes it’s great people use it and report issues. I found and reported a years old bug in Erlang that was exposed by a zlib update. Arch makes it easy to isolate and rollback dependencies which was helpful to isolate the change. On the other hand, Debian/RHEL users never had to know about this complete showstopper bug since they never ran a system that had the new zlib and the old Erlang at the same time.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#80

Post by pbowyer »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #38
upmostly wrote: post #3

I 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.

Waterloo being the main station for commuters coming in from the south: genius marketing. Hitting both managers and developers.
Post reply on HN