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I Miss Rails

chanind.github.io

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Re: I Miss Rails

#481

Post by peteforde »

tim333 wrote: post #386
peteforde wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that it's 2008 calling, but seriously: when did Heroku, Github and the bundler/gem ecosystem stop qualifying as accessible? Deploying an MVP Rails app with sophisticated functionality is so effective that it still qualifies as erotic. For me, the most compelling example of progress coming from the JS camp was my shallow investigation of the Expo platform for React Native. It has some genuinely sexy developer e…

I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.

I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up.

Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy to be of service.

Re: I Miss Rails

#482

Post by aboutruby »

peteforde wrote: post #481
tim333 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.

I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up. Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy…

Hi, if you are interested in helping people with their ruby/rails issues, there is also reddit / ruby discord / rails slack / and stack overflow. I'm trying to be active on Reddit and the Discord but not very active on slack/stack overflow. There are already quite a few people helping but more people would help :).

Re: I Miss Rails

#483

Post by peteforde »

revskill wrote: post #369
peteforde wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this is such an un-sexy answer that it might shock some sense into people that are still on the fence. It might not be too late for you. Seriously, gang: Rails is productive, fun and lets you focus on making your customers happy instead of optimal package composition.

I was a Rails user for about 4 years. The DX of Rails is unbeatable still today. But this is a trade-off i take into account. I even have a production system running on Rails, with frontend React. This stack's benefits to me: - Universality (one Typescript to rule all backend and frontend) - Separation of concern (no more MVC, only components) - Scalability (each part could scale independently) - Modularity (the busi…

I guess this just seems like a massive amount of hoop jumping that, from the outside, looks like OCD levels of premature optimization for future demands that might well not occur.

Put differently: how much more time and energy would you have had to work on your MVP if you had just used Rails?

Re: I Miss Rails

#484

Post by peteforde »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #313
peteforde wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funniest part about the enthusiasm for React masochism is that the best parts of the library are better accomplished with a combination of Turbolinks 5 and Stimulus. Not a coincidence that they're all Rails extractions. For me, the more interesting question in all of this is where did this fervour for JS-and-the-way-down actually come from? My hypothesis is that it's the natural result of a huge mess of new talen…

What purpose does it serve to take such an uncharitable view on other people? This community is full of experienced professionals who use Javascript even in the face of alternative options, and we belabor this topic every day. So what excuse do you have for assuming and hypothesizing that everyone must be an unenlightened boot camp amateur when you could've turned to anyone and simply asked? For example, to me, moder…

It's difficult to convey context or background in these conversations, and they quickly become circular based on each participant's favourite default assumptions. For example, you're clearly excited about asynchronous, Promise-driven code patterns. I am preoccupied with developer happiness and ergonomics that come primarily as a result of opinionated defaults and a relatively stable ecosystem + build process. The simple truth is that if I needed results = async map -> crawl() in rb, I would call a service written in Go or Rust... but also, the number of times where I need to green-field a web crawler is dwarfed 250-1 by building the sexiest, snappiest CRUD UIs possible.

Meanwhile, there was once upon a time a perceived crisis of junior talent which led to the creation of the first code bootcamps, all of which were taught Rails, jQuery and Sass. I'm not trying to be shitty, classist or ageist in suggesting that the bootcamp phenomena suddenly started emitting a large number of blank-slate new devs that would understandably treat every exciting idea as the most incredible thing since . After all, if you have few previous experiences, what can you compare against?

Previous generations of devs learned predominantly through either auto-didactic persistence or academic lectures; this new crop was suddenly predominantly learning from (and influencing) each other.

I recently read an excellent book called The Death of Truth, which technically has nothing to do with programming... except that in this conversation, it's totally about programming. If every coder's ideas are treated as equally valid truths even though there exists a massive gulf between their relative experiences, then we're confusing feelings with good engineering.

Re: I Miss Rails

#485

Post by revskill »

peteforde wrote: post #483
revskill wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Rails user for about 4 years. The DX of Rails is unbeatable still today. But this is a trade-off i take into account. I even have a production system running on Rails, with frontend React. This stack's benefits to me: - Universality (one Typescript to rule all backend and frontend) - Separation of concern (no more MVC, only components) - Scalability (each part could scale independently) - Modularity (the busi…

I guess this just seems like a massive amount of hoop jumping that, from the outside, looks like OCD levels of premature optimization for future demands that might well not occur. Put differently: how much more time and energy would you have had to work on your MVP if you had just used Rails?

Actually, the time spent to setup correctly all the toolings is much more than the MVP itself. The ratio is about 6/1. Once setup, it took me about 1-2 weeks to complete a MVP.

Want new feature ?

- Add a graphql API (if not exists) and compile to Typescript typings.

- Develop and deploy a React Component for that feature.

- Install and add to the application.

Re: I Miss Rails

#486

Post by davidbanham »

jimbokun wrote: post #436
davidbanham wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure thing! https://takehome.io https://clubman.app

"takehome" seems like exactly the right solution for technical interviews. Have you gotten much traction?

Thankyou, I think so too.

I find that once a company uses the product, they never stop. The customer base is very sticky.

I have also found that I bounce a lot of companies that don't "get it". They don't understand that it's about making things better for candidates and so all they see is Hackerrank with less features.

My challenge for growth is finding better ways to explain the ethos and the benefits to those companies.

Re: I Miss Rails

#487

Post by peteforde »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #464
joelbluminator wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is async everything a strength? I find it an unnatural way to think about coding, just like threading. Sure if performance absolutely requires it I'll start using threading, but why do it by default? A strength, in my eyes, is simplicity. What's simpler than a code that runs sequentially?

Node is single-threaded + async-everything which gives you simple concurrency with the async/await abstraction. It's these there things that come together to make building async apps simple. For example, I went out of my way to avoid Node before it had promises and async/await, and that seems to be the Javascript most HN users remember. Concurrency in this situation almost becomes free at the expense of changing user…

Node + Express is just fine for the same sorts of things that Sinatra is fine for. If you are more comfortable in JS than Ruby, please know that you have my full encouragement and support.

However, you are (perhaps unintentionally) twisting my words. I brought up bootcamps because I can demonstrate a strong causal association on a timeline.

The beef, such as it is, is with the 750k npm packages, the brutal moving target that is the packaging/transpiling/dependency hell/OCD bikeshedding that comes with a commitment to the JS ecosystem. And given that you used to be a Rails user, you know full well what giving up sane defaults in favour of the pursuit of pure compositional bliss looks like, but you're choosing to forget the trauma.

Meanwhile, there's an entire generation of new devs that have been told that Rails (or your favourite server side alternative) have been eclipsed by better thinking. I don't think I'm just an angry old man screaming at cars from my porch when I call bullshit.

Re: I Miss Rails

#488

Post by 0xADEADBEE »

iguana wrote: post #265
0xADEADBEE wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Typescript from the get-go on a new project recently and it's slowed down both mine and my team's development velocity a lot. Time will tell if it's a smart decision but in terms of prototyping or spiking something, I'm picking Rails every time and I think based on my current experience I'd be apt to retrofit Typescript to an existing project rather than integrate it from the beginning. I don't suppose you cou…

I don't have a book recommendation for you (what helped me was the standard documentation and about a year of daily dev time), but an observation: Your team is likely using an overly restrictive tsconfig.json. No-implicit-any, for example. Make it less restrictive, and you then have typing and no penalty for punting on it until later. If using an IDE, the effort into defining types is immediately rewarded with autoco…

I suspect you're right - we probably got a bit caught up in best practices to our detriment. Thank you for this.

Re: I Miss Rails

#490

Post by AgentME »

jasonhansel wrote: post #392
AgentME wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next.js is pretty good, but could still be better.

I'd like something focused on pure server-side rendering, so that users can have at least some interactivity (via elements) without JS.

Next.js pages do work for people without javascript too, and it's often paired with something like Express that can handle form post submissions. The Next.js+Express integration could be made smoother though.
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