Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

Post by simonbarker87 » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

Post by drdaeman » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

Scarbutt wrote: post #4

Is that two millions LOC for a single Rails application or across various Rails applications?

Post by winrid » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

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…

Post by uptownJimmy » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

danjac wrote: post #183

uptownJimmy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my implied question should be stated more explicitly: is GitHub's front end code entirely separate fro the Rails code? That's not how Rails apps usually work, I thought. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I looked at Rails code, and I don't have the slightest idea how GitHub is actually architected. But I don't remember the "front end code" in Rails being a separate thing from the server code, typically:…

Rails can just serve JSON or GraphQL from an API to an SPA frontend, or you can do full server-rendered, or Hotwire to do HTML fragment updates, or any combination thereof. IIRC Github used something like Hotwire but home-grown. I've not done Rails development for a while so not sure what the state of things is for web sockets, but I would think that's not a problem for the framework. Point is, there's nothing about…

Post by ok123456 » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

winrid wrote: post #215

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe some day Ruby will get type hinting. I'm loving it in Python. In terms of the "I wrote a block somewhere and it broke when executed for the first time two weeks later" - don't do that in a scripting language. Use the REPL to build/test the block. That's the trade off - instead of a compiler you get a fast REPL - use it! :)