[LRUG] Does Rails have an image problem?

Tue Aug 18 09:36:42 PDT 2020

Sounds like the team has a lot of existing expertise in curly-brace
languages.  Honestly, you might be the odd one out here, as it can take a
while to get comfortable and productive in a new language, and if you're
the only one who's already there, switching languages might cost your team
quite a lot in terms of forward momentum.  Also, as you've pointed out,
introducing yet another language is... unlikely to mitigate your onboarding
problems over the next 2-3 years (a likely timeframe for rewriting
:allthethings:).

I'd also be concerned that if your existing systems are brittle, getting
everyone to switch languages *might* just result in having even more
systems that are brittle, some of which happen to be half-rewritten in
Ruby.  (It's easy to write unmaintainable code in any language.)  The time
and energy they'd invest in learning a new language *could* be time and
energy better spent leveling up testing and refactoring skills in the
languages they already know.  In particular, it might be better to focus on
some of the skills and practices highlighted in this talk:
https://youtu.be/UOOuW5tqT8M.  The same author [full disclosure: a friend
of mine] also has a screencast series that will be my first stop once I
finally get around to seriously learning JS:
http://www.letscodejavascript.com/

All that said... y'all's agreement to "adopt BDD going forward" might
provide a reasonable way to introduce Ruby as part of the Cucumber stack.
(Or not; I'm aware that there is a JS implementation, but haven't checked
it out.)  Either way... at risk of looking like a self-promoting jerk, you
might appreciate some of my hard-earned advice on how to not make huge
messes using Cucumber.  (Slides:
https://www.slideshare.net/geeksam/cucumbers-have-layers-rubyconf-2014;
video:
http://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2015-cucumbers-have-layers-a-love-story)

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 2:58 AM Edmond Lepedus <ed.lepedus at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks for all your replies. Some really interesting points there. The
> ones that resonated the most with me were
> - ask them to sell me on NodeJS
> - figure out what the other devs care about
> - ask why so many large, successful companies are built on Rails
>
> I also really enjoyed reading the post about when Rails is not the right
> choice, and re-reading the Rails Doctrine, which is also one of the major
> draws of Rails. I have shared both with the team.
>
> In terms of providing additional context, I have recently joined a small
> web team in a larger games company. Our focus is to deliver added value
> services eg forums, leaderboards, achievements etc for our players.
> Although I’m only a few months in the role, the company has been a client
> of mine for many years, and I was involved in delivering the original MVP
> system before there was even a dedicated team for it. Back then, the
> project had been started in Java + Angular, but due to hiring difficulties,
> I was brought in to get it over the line. I made the point even then that
> Rails would be a much better choice, but there simply wasn’t time to start
> over. Since then, the frontend has been rewritten in React, and although we
> still have the old Java backend, new services have been built in NodeJS
> (Express + Sequelize). Now we are building a new profile service, which
> will likely grow and eventually take over the last bits of functionality
> from the Java API so it can be retired. Our team has complete autonomy when
> making tech choices, so it’s ‘just’ the other devs I have to convince.
>
> The main challenges our team faces are
> - limited dev resource
> - brittle systems, partly due to lack of automated testing (we have
> committed to adopting BDD going forward)
> - issues hiring and onboarding due to having a mishmash of stacks, largely
> homegrown systems and virtually no documentation for any of them
>
> I believe Rails will help with all of the above by improving productivity,
> providing handrails for our adoption of automated testing, and providing a
> robust, well-known and well-documented foundation for our services.
>
> I think the main concerns are the initial productivity drop while everyone
> gets up to speed, the ‘loss’ of mindshare invested in NodeJS, and
> potentially making our onboarding even more difficult in the short term as
> we will have Java, Node, Rails & React.
>
> On 17 Aug 2020, at 18:06, Ed James <ed.james.spam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Interesting topic.
>
> Ed > it’s not entirely clear from your original message *who* exactly it
> is that you’re selling Rails to - is it the dev/tech team or the business?
>
> In my experience selling Rails to the business has always been the much
> easier sell, with the only reassurance required being the availability (and
> cost!) of developers. However, trying to sell Rails to a team of developers
> is likely to be extremely difficult in most cases.
>
> It’s probably also worth thinking about whether it’s difficult because
> "Rails is Rails", or whether it’s difficult because "Rails is
> different-to-what-is-already-being-used”. Any tech team worth its salt will
> know that moving to any other tech stack is a big commitment which will
> likely have an early adjustment period of bewilderment and steep learning
> curves, resulting in reluctance/resistance to change.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Ed James
> I will respect your spam <ed.james.spam at gmail.com>
>
> On 17 Aug 2020, at 16:29, Edmond Lepedus <ed.lepedus at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi LRUG,
>
> Once again I’ve recommended Rails for a project, and once again, I’ve
> found it a really hard sell, and I suspect the decision will be to use
> NodeJS instead. It seems that outside of the Rails community, most devs
> have a pretty poor opinion or just lack of visibility into the awesomeness
> of Rails. I’ve been asked questions like “Isn’t Rails abandonware now?”,
> been pointed to StackOverflow’s developer survey (
> https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-other-frameworks-libraries-and-tools-loved3) as
> ‘evidence’ for NodeJS’s superiority and been told that “the majority of
> Rails consultants make their money on migrating people to other platforms”.
> This is not a new thing. I’ve been recommending Rails for web projects for
> nearly 7 years, both as an employee and as a consultant, with zero success.
> And before you think it’s just my credibility, I’ve not had any issues when
> recommending, WordPress, NextJS, Kubernetes, Ansible etc. It’s just Rails.
>
> My current team would benefit hugely from Rails. It would do wonders for
> everything from code quality and productivity to documentation and our
> ability to hire and onboard new developers, but I fear that we will once
> again default to NodeJS and miss out on most of those benefits.
>
> The weird thing is that we use and love systems written in Rails, such as
> GitLab, and have enthusiastically committed to migrating our forums to
> Discourse, but the halo effect from those projects doesn’t seem to be
> affecting perceptions of Rails itself.
>
> How do you sell Rails in a compelling way?
>
> Thanks,
> Ed
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