Rails World 2024 Opening Keynote - David Heinemeier Hansson

I highly recommend you watch the first half hour of DHH Rails World talk on Rails 8 even if you aren’t a Ruby dev: ▶ this video The idea of Rails 8 is to move away from trend following and try to reject some of the ideas that have become popular in the industry (like being afraid to touch a Linux server or implementing your own auth). Really though provoking stuff.

Far too late for the edit window, but the keynote[1] is an absolute must-watch for anyone who does anything related to web development [1] ▶ this video

This is amazing for the Rails ecosystem! Rails has been slowly dying, or at least it felt like that. It was like "Punk is not dead" (which it totally is)...dying slowly. Then there were some controversial decisions made about the future of Rails: no build, moving away from TypeScript, etc. These moves were controversial and risky, but seems like they paid off! And then DHH had a great keynote on the latest Rails World... ▶ this video We're back baby!

That’s one of the beautiful things about the massive Ruby ecosystem: the answer to that question is almost always yes, regardless of your need. I’m not sure what your line of work is, but if you’re doing web dev, check this out for a great primer on the current state of things (Rails 8 + Hotwire): ▶ this video If you’d prefer just some straight Ruby resources, Ruby Warrior is (or was, been a while since I’ve used it but it appears actively maintained still) a fun intro: link

Context for people who might not get the joke/parody: SST adding containers to their stack might be viewed as a "betryal" in a similar way to how some basketball fans felt when LeBron James switched teams, from Cleveland Cavaliers to Miami Heat. LeBron had a media event/interview called "The Decision" [1]. I love the clip of @dhh's keynote to engineer's "learned helplessness" to AWS and the cloud [2]. While SST + containers is very very different than DHH's Kamal [3], they both embrace containers without the paas service tax (heroku/vercel/etc) or the overhead of kubernetes. 1: link 2: ▶ this video 3: link

> I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database. Related to this observation you really should watch DHHs keynote talk at Rails World 2024 from about minute 20 to 30: ▶ this video He addresses exactly this phenomenon. EDIT: changed URL to include timestamp to the start of the relevant content.

The criticism and response both feel a bit too sensitive, but I do want to support having your own opinion/conclusion on CL probably not being the best language for the job when it comes to web stuff, or as I would phrase it CL not being the most defensible choice for web back-ends. I think it can be defensible, even just on the grounds of direct web application concerns, independent of what the actual purpose of the application is, and I'll continue trying to write everything in CL, but I sympathize with the opposition and recognize a strong argument has to be made for CL. Other options enjoy popularity and default-choice status. My primary reason is like: there's a lot of complexity in the modern web, and it really is quite convenient if you can lean on some ecosystem that pushes things under the rug for you and is trustworthy enough to keep doing so for years to come as things change. All the basic table stakes stuff like CSRF protection, sending custom CORS/CSP headers, database interfaces, logging, metrics, bcrypt hashing, selenium webdriver automation, etc. etc. all have their core pieces available in CL, but you still have to know about them and opt-in to them and occasionally roll up your sleeves to do things your own way from scratch. They also don't all have great documentation, maintenance, or integration with each other. (There's even some dumb github drama I happened to notice being mentioned on discord the other day around a breaking change related to websocket

Is there any documentation available for ActiveRecord Search / SolidSearch yet? ▶ this video this might allow me to drop OpenSearch. Also, how is he able to use private fields in the js example? Is he using any polyfilling?

I switched from Next.js/React to Rails for my side projects due to JS ecosystem fatigue. Anecdotally, I've noticed some people making the same move. The open-source finance app Maybe is one that pops up on a lot of searches. imo Rails has been having a bit of a revival ever since v7 introduced a cleaner approach to front end development with Hotwire (specifically, Turbo and Stimulus) to get SPA-like behavior with relatively little effort. What I love about modern Rails is that it's an evolving framework that is still anchored to a consistent vision for developer productivity. Now with 8.0 having just been released, Rails is increasing built-in support for deploying outside managed providers like AWS. I can't speak for whether it's going to see a resurgence among big companies other than famous users like Shopify, but I can't see myself using Next over Rails for any of my personal projects, even as someone who writes JavaScript and React code professionally. Relevant links: - Maybe moves to Rails: link - Rails 7.0 release announcement: link - Hotwire: link - Rails World 2024 Keynote w/ DHH, introducing Rails 8: ▶ this video - Rails 8.0 Beta: No PaaS Required link