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Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

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Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#201

Post by ksec »

tiffanyh wrote: post #135
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…

> “It must also be a massive boon for the Rails ecosystem to have such a large property running off the head.” I would have expected Microsoft to focus on developer efforts into speeding up Ruby as a language given they are one of a small few large companies that have deep language/compiler expertise.

Unfortunately Github is the only product that uses Ruby inside Microsoft. So their incentive is pretty small. I do wish someone inside Github could push M$ to spend some money and collaborate with Shopify on their JIT effort though.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#202

Post by 0xblinq »

jstummbillig wrote: post #12
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…

Have a look at AdonisJS. It's in a somewhat weird spot: On the one hand it is mature and has amazing DX/UX going for it, with a lot of very thoughtful tooling. On the other, for some reason, it has always remained niche with just a couple of core developers, even though it's now nearing version 6 and at least 8 years of releases. I do not know why that is the case. It's a beautifully written full stack framework, tak…

I think it’s main problem is the lack of community. There are almost no third party packages and the core team is pretty small (one or two devs). I wouldn’t risk using it to find myself 5 years down the line using a zombie project I couldn’t move away from.

One thing is picking a library which I can replace if it it gets abandoned, etc. a very different one is picking a full stack framework where replacing it means rewriting everything.

If I wanted a full stack framework, I’d pick Laravel or Rails because they’re already proven, have a big community, are used by big names in the industry and I’m 99.9% sure they’ll still be around and maintained 5 years from now.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#203

Post by acedTrex »

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

You need a culture that values upgrades not for new features but for future proofing

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#204

Post by 0xblinq »

himhckr wrote: post #129
Gigachad wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used AdonisJS. Reminds me a lot of rails but with the added safety of typescript.

Totally agree! I have used many frameworks (even written my own) but nothing gets close to Laravel for PHP and AdonisJS for TypeScript in terms of features out of the box and DX.

Adonis is inspired from Laravel but it’s far from being comparable. Features, community, “battle proveness”, third party packages, etc are just not there yet.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#205

Post by ksec »

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…

Off topic question, Is it still very hard to make $200K in London as a web developer?

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#206

Post by gedy »

sickcodebruh wrote: post #196
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…

I started my professional career with Rails 8 years ago and deeply miss aspects of it. It uses lines of code so efficiently, letting you go from zero to product with outrageous speed. Everything is a solved problem. Ruby as a language is so expressive, so beautifully ergonomic, so easy to read. It's such a joy. But the view layer has not aged well. After years of working with a focus on React and TypeScript, I can't…

> But the view layer has not aged well.

Agreed - In my opinion, Rails messaging/soft marketing could be a lot better about how it's great for a data driven backend, whatever the frontend/UI.

I know there's things like API mode and webpacker, but this all seems very secondary and begrudging at times. Maybe I listen too much to what DHH says, but definitely think the Rails view stuff should be what's secondary. It's a turnoff for a lot of devs who would otherwise be quite happy with Rails as a backend.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#207

Post by jakemoffatt2 »

danforddotdev wrote: post #195

I'm curious what their data access layer looks like underneath that monolith. Is the Rails piece mostly now just a frontend for dozens of other services, properly owned and maintained by other teams? I don't mean to trivialize something that's obviously huge and complex as "just a frontend", but IME one of the biggest things that breaks down in a Rails monolith as it scales is heavy, direct usage of ActiveRecord. Eit…

Can't speak to how GitHub does it, but in every Rails org I've been at, eventually we create secondary services that own a specific domain, and the primary app becomes a gateway that clients use to talk to those services. It's rare to spin up a new service in a new language/framework. A typical pattern is to migrate the service within the monolith into a Rails engine, and then move that to a new app where the app mounts only that engine, or one can find a way to make the monolith deployable with only certain engines mounted, like with an env var.

A Rails engine is basically a self contained Rails app, including routes, which you can mount inside of a host Rails app at any route if your choosing. They're usually used to build reusable libraries, but this use case also works very well.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#208

Post by rdevsrex »

jstummbillig wrote: post #12
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…

Have a look at AdonisJS. It's in a somewhat weird spot: On the one hand it is mature and has amazing DX/UX going for it, with a lot of very thoughtful tooling. On the other, for some reason, it has always remained niche with just a couple of core developers, even though it's now nearing version 6 and at least 8 years of releases. I do not know why that is the case. It's a beautifully written full stack framework, tak…

I use AdonisJs at work. Having used Rails and Laravel before it was a very easy jump.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#209

Post by WirelessGigabit »

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…

You MUST have an insane amount of test coverage to trust something like this to Ruby.

I'm new to Ruby, with 13 yoe as a SW engineer.

Personally, I find it a very hard language to master. Writing tests often feels like I'm settings variables left and right without seeing them being used in the current context. But that then happens to be part of the let() way in rspec.

Now you might say: why use rspec? I inherited this codebase, so gotta do what you gotta do.

I do really miss my compiler. I am not a fan of writing a block somewhere that can be invoked 2 weeks later for the first time and then fail, because someone passed in a number where a string was expected.

I went from PHP to Java to C# to F# to JS to Rust. F# and Rust stand out in terms of hardest to write, but easiest to trust.

I don't have that feeling with Ruby, and RoR.

But, again, my personal opinion. Good friend of mine started with Ruby, and he loves it. He says that he accepts the magic things for what they are, and uses them. My brain doesn't allow that. I have to understand.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#210

Post by mdaniel »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #157

I've been using Rails and GitHub since the first 2.x days. I have been expecting an announcement that they are switching to .NET since Microsoft bought them. I'm guessing it's too big of a bite, even for Microsoft, thank Ada. I love being able to point recalcitrant policy makers at my company at GitHub as an example of a top web app -- the context for which they already know very well -- being a Rails monolith. I'd l…

> I'd love to see their Gemfile.

I would bet it's present in GHE's OVA (https://enterprise.github.com/releases/3.8.1/download)

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