Rails Cheat Sheet

In my last job I encountered my first Ruby&#x2F;Rails codebase ever (mostly REST APIs but a few server-rendered views as well). Despite the initial chaotic impression of the codebase (it was a startup after all) with all the Rails magic on top, I really fell in love with the framework after a more experienced Rails dev introduced a few key conventions and helpful libraries to the codebase.<p>Out of those, I’d at least add the RuboCop [1] linter and the BetterSpecs [2] guidelines to this list. Both eliminated bikeshedding in the team and freed up brainpower to solve actual problems: the first one helps you learn intricacies of Ruby bit by bit right in the IDE and the latter one pushes you to write test in a specific style that’s easy to maintain and trust.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rubocop&#x2F;rubocop">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rubocop&#x2F;rubocop</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betterspecs.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betterspecs.org&#x2F;</a>

I went all in on Rails a couple of years ago. Although the overall feature set is amazing, code discoverability has been a frustrating stumbling block from day one.<p>The &quot;magic&quot; (convention over configuration, autoloading, metaprogramming, etc) makes it difficult to know what methods are available to use. I end up over-relying on the official docs, which are of inconsistent quality. One example: api.rubyonrails.org lacks code examples, doesn&#x27;t usually state what a given method returns, and many entries are outright blank.<p>Editor integration could help, but feels lackluster. With TypeScript in VS Code, hints come up as I write. I can hover anything to see its type, methods, and source code. With Rails, I can poorly approximate this behavior with a collection of half-functional community extensions, or I can buy and use the slow, bloated RubyMine IDE.<p>Rails enabled me to build my product, but my experience doesn&#x27;t match the love I hear from other devs. I wish I knew how to make it click.

Thats a good point and nice to see that the rails community is starting to work to consider new engineers more. The whole JS and also PHP&#x2F;Laravel ecosystem is doing this already since quite some time. Rails is still the best option imo when you want to be productive as a small team - but the learning resource don’t keep up with other frameworks&#x2F;languages.

I think one of the things that sort of stopped rails from becoming mainstream was that when WebApps really took off everything switched to SPA apps. Now that&#x27;s shifting back a bit (a good thing imo) as many people are starting to recognize the downsides of frontend apps. Next.js is basically one giant workaround for the shortcomings of spa apps.

I always hear good things about Ruby on Rails, yet it remains relatively niche. I first heard about Ruby + Rails in 2013, and ten years later it seems to be just as niche. Loved by those who use it, but niche. Why does it continue to struggle in this way when more recent languages like Go are booming?

&quot;The Railscasts Pro videos were recently made free by the author because the videos are dated.&quot;<p>Six years ago (2017), not recently.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;railscasts.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;13" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;railscasts.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;13</a>

My impression (from years past) is that Ruby is what developers loved. It was my first “real” programming language and the reason I fell in love with coding. These days I’m mostly writing in JS and Node for work. Rails is the money-maker, but the philosophy of convention over configuration is why it really off IMO, and something that is both underrated and missing in the JS world.

Rails made me more confused than Spring did. The amount of magic makes it really hard to reason about what&#x27;s going on.

The fact that people love Ruby proved that Human hated parentheses and semicolons.

Great collection of resources.

1 point by fallingmeat 1 minute ago | next | edit | delete [–]<p>Why do similar articles or headlines seem to come up at the same time on front page? e.g. there is another article on Rails that happens to be front page right now that is seemingly otherwise unrelated (the other article is called The Rails Doctrine).

It’s always so odd when these type of posts pop up and I scroll through and see comments about how people love Ruby&#x2F;Rails. Mainly because I can’t stand the language and framework. I absolutely hate any time I have to read through Ruby&#x2F;Rails code or write something in it.

Ruby has the worst, most complex syntax I have ever used.