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Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

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Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#241

Post by hanley »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #209
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 thi…

You don't have to use `let` in specs. I prefer setting instance variables inside a `before :each` block.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#242

Post by ZephyrBlu »

NhanH wrote: post #220
skeeter2020 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this absolute is a little ignorant. For some products the scalability is the core competitive advantage. He can't engineer it in after the fact.

Can you give some examples of such products?

A database would be an obvious example. Analytics platforms and message queues are another couple that come to mind.

You can't patch the kind of performance you need for these products after the fact, it needs to be baked into the architecture.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#243

Post by ksec »

hocuspocus wrote: post #225
ksec wrote: post #199

And as I have said before but worth repeating again, Rails is perhaps the only open source framework that is being battle tested in development at scale. It may not be the fastest ( or in fact quite slow ), but I dont think you could find similar testing being done and Deployed at the scale of Github on any other framework. I wonder if Eileen Uchitelle will bring this practice to Shopify as well? Edit: It seems [1] S…

> but I dont think you could find similar testing being done and Deployed at the scale of Github on any other framework. ?! There's at least Spring.

It's been a very very long time I touched anything Java so excuse my ignorance. I know there are many Enterprise, internal Web Apps that uses Spring. But are there any web companies built their SaaS or Consumer Web App on Spring, that is at the scale of Shopify and Github?

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#244

Post by hocuspocus »

ksec wrote: post #243
hocuspocus wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I dont think you could find similar testing being done and Deployed at the scale of Github on any other framework. ?! There's at least Spring.

It's been a very very long time I touched anything Java so excuse my ignorance. I know there are many Enterprise, internal Web Apps that uses Spring. But are there any web companies built their SaaS or Consumer Web App on Spring, that is at the scale of Shopify and Github?

Most companies at that scale don't use a single framework or even language but there's probably more Spring at Amazon than RoR at GitHub, Stripe and Shopify combined.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#245

Post by lenkite »

Alifatisk wrote: post #128
AeroNotix wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You suggest people should refactor later on when needed?

If you are fire-fighting production issues at scale all the time with the original version, you may find yourself out-of-capacity for a refactoring/rewrite. After experiencing this terrible state of affairs, I prefer getting performance and robustness (mostly) right the first time.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#246

Post by lenkite »

ksec wrote: post #243
hocuspocus wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I dont think you could find similar testing being done and Deployed at the scale of Github on any other framework. ?! There's at least Spring.

It's been a very very long time I touched anything Java so excuse my ignorance. I know there are many Enterprise, internal Web Apps that uses Spring. But are there any web companies built their SaaS or Consumer Web App on Spring, that is at the scale of Shopify and Github?

Aliexpress and Udemy come right at the top of my mind. But there are quite a few more. (several German web-sites like Trivago). Spring Boot is used more outside the U.S. - Java is respected more in the rest of the world.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#247

Post by throwaway2847 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #244
ksec wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a very very long time I touched anything Java so excuse my ignorance. I know there are many Enterprise, internal Web Apps that uses Spring. But are there any web companies built their SaaS or Consumer Web App on Spring, that is at the scale of Shopify and Github?

Most companies at that scale don't use a single framework or even language but there's probably more Spring at Amazon than RoR at GitHub, Stripe and Shopify combined.

Stripe doesn't use Ruby on Rails, they have a framework developed in house

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#248

Post by jstummbillig »

0xblinq wrote: post #202
jstummbillig wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I partly agree.

Having a community is nice and motivating, but that makes building good software over that many years without ever being the community darling more impressive to me and seems like a great indicator for deep commitment, that gives me a different kind of confidence than hype and VC money.

I am not sure which sustains better in 2023.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#249

Post by q845712 »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #209
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 thi…

I've written in python, C++, Ruby, and Go.

I hear you on the compilers, and I do miss them at least a little whenever I don't have them. But my goodness, there's really something fun in Ruby. I think it shines in smaller codebases, situations where you can have some hope of understanding 90% of everything that's going on as a single developer (and honestly part of the sales pitch of microservices is that you know there's no funny business crossing the wire, so you only need to know the magic bits of the services you work in). But there's really so much joy in stringing together a few functions in a single line, knowing that there might be a few different types being passed around depending on context but knowing that all the functions can handle all the types, and not pausing after every line to check whether an err was nil... Honestly when I have a compiler i miss the magic, and when I have the magic I miss the compiler.

Re: Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

#250

Post by amrocha »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #150
jeremyjh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These problems are always more common in server-rendered apps though, because front-end state is always a patchwork. And the Rails developers and community have a strong preference for this architecture.

I observe the exact opposite. Server rendered UIs are far more often times up to date than client rendered apps.

I can't think of a single website that's real time and server rendered
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