Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019 • Hacker News Board

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#191

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #135

LanceH wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You can find a RoR developer.

Ha. It's so hard to find Ruby developers. But I will grant that when you do find one, they are usually pretty good developers.

Go to any con and you will find plenty.

My experience with ruby devs is that they are usually employed and not actively searching. Since it isn't the flavor of the week anymore you don't have as many programmers entering the field as ruby devs.

Mentoring is always a solid option too, the language and frameworks are simple. Any CS graduate worth his degree will pick it up in no time.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#192

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

faizshah wrote: post #31

Among my peers (undergrads in college) Rails has largely lost mindshare to python and Node (and even PHP!). At the 3 hackathons I went to this semester I could not find a single other person who knew Rails (so I always have to switch to node or python). If you take a look at devpost, Rails is increasingly losing popularity: https://devpost.com/software/built-with/ruby-on-rails My plea to the Rails community and Rails…

Most of my career has been spent building web apps in Rails, Node, a smattering of python frameworks.

Python is pretty great, but the fragmentation of the ecosystem puts it behind Rails imho.

Node is a constant headache and I have seen it be the death of more than one startup. Unless you are using a typed version of JS it is going to be a problem, I can guarantee it.

Rails kinda just works. It isn't as performant as I would like, but for the overwhelming majority of web apps that isn't an issue.

I know it can be hard to find rails devs, so just make them. Hire competent CS grads and train them. If they actually earned their degree it will be easy.

If you are in an executive role at a startup building a web app and optimizing for team velocity it is always in your interests to choose an opinionated framework that has already solved the hard problems for you and imposed structure on your team.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#193

Post by igouy » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:29 PM UTC

theredbox wrote: post #181

cwt137 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP vs Ruby https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... Python vs Ruby (mixed results) https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

In all of those benchmarks ruby runs with —jit

And … ?

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#194

Post by bitterchicken » Thu, May 30, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

diveanon wrote: post #185

karmakaze wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there. This only seems to 'work'--until you try to raise throughput/reliability and lower errors/latency. What ends up happening is that the module boundaries that made sense in a monolith don't make sense as microservices when communications are allowed to fail. Typically the modules are the source-of-truth for some concern with consumers layered above it. This is the worst pattern with microservices where…

Or you can do poor man's microservices and use the same monolith with different production flags to load balance it. Keep all your code in one repo, deploy that codebase to multiple servers, but have it acting in different capacities. 1 email server, 5 app servers dishing out html, 2 api servers Etc It works very well and was able to handle spikes of traffic during super bowl ads without any problems.

This is the biggest favor you can do for yourself. The developer experience is as easy as production without descending into container induced madness.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#195

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

bitterchicken wrote: post #194

diveanon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can do poor man's microservices and use the same monolith with different production flags to load balance it. Keep all your code in one repo, deploy that codebase to multiple servers, but have it acting in different capacities. 1 email server, 5 app servers dishing out html, 2 api servers Etc It works very well and was able to handle spikes of traffic during super bowl ads without any problems.

This is the biggest favor you can do for yourself. The developer experience is as easy as production without descending into container induced madness.

Testing is a breeze too because you are using the same tools across the board.

I don't know why it fell out of fashion, but for your average web app it is the gold standard imo.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#196

Post by munmaek » Thu, May 30, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #122

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or if you want productivity and a performant web server, try Elixir + Phoenix. Number crunching still has to be dished off to something else like C, Rust or Go, though.

I'm working on three projects for three customers right now. Phoenix, Django and Rails. From my personal experience: 1) Elixir + Phoenix have some definite advantages when spawning asynchronous tasks (no external dependencies, it's in the language) and it runs reasonably quick. 2) Coding in Ruby on Rails is faster. An example, it's much easier to write queries in ActiveRecord than in Ecto, which is over engineered fo…

That's been my experience with sinatra and padrino as well.

The promise of a lean app with rails' ecosystem is too good to be true, and it is. It's so much easier to just start with rails from the beginning instead of slowly adding things piecemeal.

I still like sinatra and flask but they have one purpose: very very simple webapis, that's it. Nothing even remotely as complex as user sessions or forms.

I've been playing with Pheonix/Elixir here and there but I've never sat down and written a full app in it. I guess that's the future ultimately, at least for larger companies that need that performance.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#197

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

batiste wrote: post #102

munmaek wrote: post #3

The beauty of rails is how simple and quick it is to get a robust (if bare) application up and running. Even if you use sinatra or padrino instead, the wealth of the web community built around ruby still makes it rather easy. If I were a tech lead and had to make a choice now, in 2019, I would still (probably) choose rails-api for a backend with some separate frontend. I've been slowly working on a backend for a web…

Did RoR people ever fixed their monolith inducing architecture?

What's there to fix?

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#198

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #91

davidkuhta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, as a non-fintech Elixir/Phoenix dev, what particular facets of Elixir/Phoenix are fintech startups finding attractive/useful?

A lot of finance is built on event sourcing (without calling it that), in that you can’t just overwrite your existing DB state with new state; everything has to be a ledger with a history, and you have to be able to trace the “provenance” of your data—what version of your business rules were used to compute any derived results, both so that those results (and results derived further from them) can be recomputed when…

Hire this guy.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#199

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #156

Rails doesn't scale, or more accurately described as Rails does not scale easily or cheaply. A lot of people doing consultation may have heard their client ask if they should switch to something else because Rails does not X, or Y or Z. ( Normally the standard reply is But GitHub and Shopify is using Rails as well, which should settle the argument ) Rails, by default is still viewed as a Server Rendered Only Framewor…

I am curious about your definition of scale, because in my experience this is just flat out untrue.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#200

Post by diveanon » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #42

I had the opportunity to run some hackatons / startup coaching last year with some CS student at University of Wisconsin- Madison. I spoke in front of some large lectures and asked students what languages they were learning. Literally no one out of a few hundred students was learning ruby. Go/nodejs/etherium is what people were putting their energy into.

Learning a language is trivial, as an educator it is your responsibility to teach them that in order to be a successful developer they should be flexible and well rounded.

Tribalism in tech helps no one.