rails

This was originally titled “Rails is not written in Ruby” but based on feedback, I decided to change the title. I’m born and raised in Kraków, a beautiful city in Poland, maybe you’ve heard about it, maybe you’ve even been here. In Poland we speak Polish, which is a really difficult language, it’s actually considered one of the top-10 most difficult languages to learn in the world. In Poland, just like in many other countries, there are regions where dialects are used rather than “the pure” form of the language, and so in my city, we have our own dialect....

I decided to let it all out. What a funny coincident because exactly 5 years ago I wrote that I’m leaving Rails for good. I thought I’m gonna leave Ruby too but that didn’t happen and I’m still a very happy Rubyist and because of this I’m really saddened to see what’s been going on the past few days; but HEY, it’s up to us to make something good out of it....

This is a follow-up to the discussion that was started last week after I published “My time with Rails is up”. Since this article received a lot of feedback, over 1000 comments on various sites and even more tweets, despite my greatest efforts, I didn’t manage to reply to everything. Many people were confused about some of the arguments, as I didn’t do a good job at providing proper context and making certain things clearer....

Please also read my follow-up about abstractions and the role of a framework Last year I made a decision that I won’t be using Rails anymore, nor I will support Rails in gems that I maintain. Furthermore, I will do my best to never have to work with Rails again at work. Since I’m involved with many Ruby projects and people have been asking me many times why I don’t like Rails, what kind of problems I have with it and so on, I decided to write this long post to summarize and explain everything....

We started experimenting with a new validation library under dry-rb organization a couple of months ago, and last month I released the first version of dry-validation. Since then I worked hard on improving it and adding support for i18n. Today, I released dry-validation 0.3.0 with a couple of bug fixes, new features and a complete support for i18n. Before I tell you what it is and how it can help you, let me start by explaining the reasoning behind this project....

Today I’m tired and frustrated. And it’s not the first time that I have those negative feelings. Typically I just complain on twitter, lose some followers, wait a bit to calm down and move on. But today I need to vent and convert my negative emotions into something constructive and hopefully meaningful to others. Every time I simply whine about certain aspects of Ruby ecosystem and especially Rails people are asking me specific questions that I fail to address properly....

Check out a follow-up on Ruby Rogues Exactly 8 years ago I started working professionally as a rails developer. I’ve spent a lot of time working for various clients, on various projects - from small green-field apps to 5+ year old rails monstrosities. In addition to Rails development I got involved in OSS. Back in 2011 I joined DataMapper core team, a couple years later I started working on ROM project and effectively stopped working on DataMapper....

Today DHH published a blog post about TDD being dead (to him at least). It’s really not that surprising since from what I know (please correct me if I’m wrong) David’s experience is mostly based on building web apps with Rails. I get that, I really do. For me practicing TDD in a rails environment is much harder than when I work on my OSS libraries. There are many reasons why TDD in Rails is just a bit harder than it could be but that’s a big, separate subject....

I don’t have exact numbers but I believe TDD isn’t really popular amongst rails developers. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that the two of the most complex elements in the rails stack, models and controllers, are very convoluted concepts and are simply hard to test. When you’re building a typical rails application most of the business logic lives in the active record models and controllers. Testing controllers in rails is a bit cumbersome but I still encourage people to write tests for them....

A few weeks back we had a small drama about SRP. There were some smart comments, some stupid ones and a few funny jokes even, like that for example: https://twitter.com/porras/status/220456288017059840 If I remember correctly it all started with this post. I’ve seen criticism on twitter saying that the post shows shitty code, that it’s more complex than it should be, that User class is definitely the best place to put code that creates a user and so on....