24 Sep 2020
In the spring of 2020, we surveyed over 2,000 Ruby on Rails developers from 92 different countries. One of the questions that we asked the community about was, "What are some technical podcasts that you enjoy listening to?"
Here are the top ten!
22 Sep 2020
27 Feb 2020
16 Oct 2019
Are you staring down the face of a Rails app with a multitude of failing specs? Here are some strategies to chip away at failing specs during an upgrade – and keep your sanity in the process.
28 May 2019
Robby speaks with Eileen Uchitelle, Senior Engineer at Github and member of the Rails core team. They discuss Eileen's process for upgrading Rails at Github from 3.2 to 5.2 from both a technical and organizational point of view.
3 Dec 2018
Stuck with nowhere to go? It happens. Get your grit on and break down problems with these simple PM steps.
26 Nov 2018
Subscription companies big and small are using Ruby on Rails to keep their online businesses running.
5 Oct 2018
Yesterday, DHH announced a new feature that will be available in the upcoming Rails 6: Action Text.
At a high level, I really like the idea of Action Text. I think it is right in line with what makes Rails attractive to use in the first place: it helps you to quickly and easily build a website with rich functionality that, in the right ecosystem, just works out of the box.
The idea of sitting down one afternoon and deciding to make a site with rich text comments and posts, file uploads, WebSockets notifications of said uploads and posts, and then actually having that site be up and running the same day – using one single framework – is pretty freaking insane from a high level.
But the devil is in the details, as always. It currently looks like Action Text is built on ActiveStorage, which means that lots of legacy applications that are still using other file upload methods, like Carrierwave, will have trouble implementing this feature. It’s also likely to be tough to switch if you already have a WYSIWYG editor in place and want to switch to Action Text. I can immediately think of two such applications we maintain that fall into this category.
Overall, though, I like this idea. It furthers Rails ability to truly be a one-stop-shop solution for creating and maintaining websites.
Want to read more about this upcoming addition to Rails? Here are all the links to explore:
15 Aug 2018
This year, we partnered with Portland Women in Tech to create the data visualization site for their 2018 community survey. The results are now live.
21 Jun 2018
You’ve read it. I’ve read it. We’ve all read it somewhere. On a good day, Rails is a dying language, and on a bad day it’s already dead. But is that really the case? And what's that statement even based on? This article details an interesting bit of research done by Yoel Blum on the demand for Ruby on Rails developers. And if you think Rails developers aren’t in demand, you might be surprised by the findings.
He had previously written about the decline in popularity of Rails, and mentioned Laravel, Django, and Express.JS as comparably popular frameworks. This previous piece was based on StackOverflow questions asked over time – which is not necessarily the best measure of a framework’s popularity.
Yoel researched the number of job openings posted on LinkedIn for various frameworks. Job postings are a seemingly fair measurement of demand for a certain skill set. So how in demand were Ruby on Rails developers?
In the United States, Rails was the second most mentioned framework in job descriptions behind .NET, with 8,710 mentions (For comparison, Asp.NET has 12,203). When you narrow the search down to Silicon Valley, Rails actually comes in ahead of both .NET and Django with over 1,000 job postings at the time of article publication.
Is this data 100% bulletproof in showing the popularity of Rails? Not exactly. One thing I’ve noticed while looking at developer job descriptions is that often more than one framework is mentioned, written like this: Web application development experience in Ruby on Rails or other modern MVC framework (Spring, Backbone.js, etc...). This means there may be some overlap in the data that would take some more digging to uncover.
But these numbers are certainly a promising look at the current state of Ruby on Rails in the broader ecosystem of application development. And it’s a helpful response to the next person that asks you why you’re still using Ruby on Rails. :)
For the rest of Yoel's data findings and conclusions, you can read the full article on Medium.
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