I haven't exactly been shy about my excitement for us being so close to launching hey.com, but I'm also positively giddy about sharing the conceptual compressions we discovered on the tech side along the way. It's fundamentally changed how we write frontend code.
Perhaps the best way to express the change is that if a pull request includes custom JavaScript code, that's taken as a smell to be investigated. Doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, but it quite possibly could be avoided. That's how we ended up with a ~40kb JS bundle.
The fundamental insight is that we can avoid 95% of all app-specific JavaScript by building better, more flexible framework solutions. All new app-specific JS now has to answer: Why? Why not CSS? Why not [new approaches]? Result: Very little app-specific JS!
And end result is that it feels like the early days of Rails: We're doing things fundamentally differently than the entire rest of the industry, and it's affording us some astounding productivity gains. Managing 6+ platforms, with tiny teams, centering off a majestic monolith.
I covered the concept of conceptual compression in my 2018 RailsConf keynote, and that's exactly what's happening. Entire swaths of concerns are getting pushed down into the framework level, and app developers don't have to worry about it any more.
