#rails

This was the flagship keynote for the framework’s premier gathering, and it felt less like an affirmation of Rails’ future and more like an intellectual abandonment of its foundational craft, delivered by a creator increasingly insulated from the core community that used, supported, and helped build Rails alongside him.

The blog demo was a real Rails application running full stack in your browser. Action Cable over BroadcastChannel. Active Record over IndexedDB. The editor runs on WebContainers — Node.js and npm, entirely in browser memory. The same patterns, the same code structure, no server. What originally motivated this is now child's play to build. I want judges to be able to record scores during an event despite unreliable Wi-Fi. Downloading the agenda and that judge's scores entered to date and then running the existing ERB views over IndexedDB just works. Posting updates in real time when possible and batch when connectivity resumes is straightforward. Since each judge records their own scores, there are no merge conflicts. Mount the resulting offline SPA via Rack middleware, and everything works transparently.

The tent is being made smaller. To stay in the tent going forward you will increasingly be forced to agree with David. I’ve been involved with Ruby for seventeen years: why am I the one being pushed out in order to make space for toxic and abusive dudes?

Here’s a dude who barely had any time to confront the world before failing into an infinite money glitch in the form of Ruby on Rails, Jeff Bezos throwing him crazy money, Apple bundling his software as a highlighted feature, becoming a “new work” celebrity and Silicon Valley “Guru”. Is it any surprise that such a person later would find the most minuscule kind of opposition as an all-out attack on his self-image?

Silence and appeasement is only emboldening DHH to ratchet up the toxicity and allowing the damage to continue. Perhaps if enough of those in positions of power call him out on his bullshit he’ll at at least follow his own advice and keep his politics to himself. More importantly though, it will send a clear message to the wider Ruby community (and those who may be considering joining it) that the majority does not stand with DHH and his toxic views.

Interestingly, all of the things that used to annoy me about Ruby and Rails now annoy me much, much, much less. I have accepted that there is no perfect language or framework. You just have to know its strengths and weaknesses and deal with them. Luckily, there are some really good frameworks out there for people who want to focus on building a good product. I think Rails is probably one of the best, but there are a lot of other long-lived frameworks with lots of active contributors that are probably just as good. It might still be worth it to choose a more exotic language, framework or to dive in and write your own. If only for the opportunity to learn these kinds of lessons on your own.

Rails-style MVC frameworks are both too much, and not enough at the same time. It really is time for a new framework to support this new architecture.

Rails-style MVC frameworks are both too much, and not enough at the same time. It really is time for a new framework to support this new architecture.

That said, if making Javascript look and act kinda like Rails makes Rails devs happier, maybe it just means I’m not Ruby enough.

In the Times Interactive News Department, we pay careful attention to caching strategy to make sure it’s a good fit for the project at hand.

"A clean, simple, and unobtrusive ruby authentication solution."

"Could an app like WordPress, easy for users of medium technical knowledge to run and customize, easy for developers to extend, and easy for hosts to provide, be written in Ruby? If so, how?"

"Rails is a short-stack framework for developing database-contained web applications according to the Model-Model-Model pattern."

"But I hope that this reaches someone somewhere thinking, “God our old code is ugly. If we only threw it all away and did it all over in Rails, it’d be so much easier!”"

"Wait 2 Moore’s Law cycles for the resulting program to run as fast as the original Ruby version, and while waiting, sing your praises to Turing."

"Arg stabby stab stab stabbity fuck stab"

"FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5."

"Routes is a Python re-implementation of the Rails routes system for mapping URL's to Controllers/Actions and generating URL's."

"Routes is a Python re-implementation of the Rails routes system that allows for a two-way mapping between URLs and a dictionary."

"I have a confession to make: Ruby on Rails does not impress me."

"It is significantly1 less effort to implement a web application in Rails than in any other framework in which I have worked but it is not better than those other frameworks, just easier."

"The individual records open up as YAML-documents that you can interact with and the changes are persisted."

"This tutorial is intended for first-time users of Rails who want to build a small database-driven application."