Thread by @bradgessler

Sr Rails devs describe Rails as being the easiest and most productive way to build web apps. Meanwhile @joemasilotti @excid3 & others discuss how we’re losing a generation of Jr Rails devs because its daunting.

Can both be true?

Here’s my story on how Rails is losing Jrs.

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But first, this is NOT a list of complaints—it’s meant to open the eyes of Sr devs to the idea that Rails has strayed from its promise of “convention over configuration” and how other frameworks have caught up to Rails over the past decade.

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Let’s get do it!

🧸 Assets: a tale of a menu that got too big

Do you use importmaps? js-bunding? css-bunlding? js-bundling *and* css-bundling? What if you need to switch from importmaps to js-bundling? What’s sprockets and propshaft?

There was a time when Rails had one asset pipeline: Sprockets

Sprockets had its issues, but one great thing about those times is we only had to learn one thing and wrestle with it to get it working.

I wrote about how to navigate the complexity of assets, but it’s still not enough for people new to Rails.

fly.io/ruby-dispatch/…

📒 Rails 7.x defaults to importmaps for JS assets, but there’s no mention of them in the official assets docs at guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline…

You have to be “in the know” to find the docs at github.com/rails/importma…, which is something a person new to Rails won’t know.

Finally, there was a time when a Rails gem plugin could be installed and assets would Just Work™. Today that’s no longer true since a plugin might work with Sprockets, but not jsbundling or importmaps.

Here’s one example of that confusion github.com/basecamp/local…

🔥 Hotwired

hotwired.dev doesn’t mention Rails. It’s trying to be framework agnostic, but could somebody please point me to a non-Rails framework that’s using Hotwired?

Its easy to see how a Jr might be confused by this and think they’re at the wrong place.

Even secondary pages like turbo.hotwired.dev don’t mention Rails. Only when I’m 3 levels deep at turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/intro… do I see Rails, but all the examples are generic and don’t use Rails helpers.

The substantive Rails docs at github.com/hotwired/turbo… are a footnote.

☎️ WebSockets & Background Workers

Want to build a realtime web application in Rails? Deploying it to production is actually quite difficult. You’d have to know that Sidekiq is de facto background worker framework and AnyCable is the way to deploy WS.

There’s a point in your journey as a Rails dev where you have the epiphany that most production Rails applications use Redis for caching, WebSockets, and Background workers.

Calling it “Rails on Redis” wouldn’t be too far off, and its just as important as the DB.

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea that there’s a lot of stuff Sr devs take for granted that represents a learning curve for Jrs.

What can we do about it? 🤔

The obvious is “mentor a Jr” and I don’t like Tweeting about obvious stuff, so here’s some other ideas…

🫣 Look at other frameworks

Rails was a breath of fresh air when it was introduce, but most languages have caught up to Rails.

- phoenixframework.org
- laravel.com
- django-unicorn.com

Look at them and steal all their good ideas, esp the docs & dev UX.

🧸 Steer Rails back towards convention over configuration

If you maintain OSS projects, do your best to steer your project and the Rails community back towards conventions.

The more we standardize on how parts of Rails works, the bigger & better plugin ecosystem we’ll enjoy.

📕 Improve documentation

There’s lots of examples above for how documentation could be improved both in the core Rails docs and Hotwire docs.

The docs are ideally direct, opinionated, & tell devs “the one way” to do a thing instead of giving them a bunch of choices to navigate.

💡 Make the Dev UX more helpful

When a Rails project is booted up, here’s what people see: a “Rails” hood ornament with no indication of what to do next.

Compare that with Phoenix, which points people towards documentation and community.

Lots of potential here!

👯‍♀️ Mentor a Jr

I said I wouldn’t say mentor a Jr, but it does help! If you do take on mentorship, it will be helpful for learning from them what parts of Rails are difficult to navigate both within the stack and within the docs.

To sum it up, Rails was ahead of its time when it shipped 10+ years ago.

Today we take it for granted because we know it so well and maybe haven’t closely followed other frameworks.

They’ve caught up, and its worth watching if we want to keep the Jr’s flowing into Rails.

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