Ruby on Rails….dead?
Long before my software engineering journey, I’ve heard the phrase Ruby, Ruby on Rails maybe a handful of times in my comings and goings through the internet. I was able to grasp that it was programming language but never really gave it much thought because I never considered a career in tech. Now here I am, knee deep-no-neck deep, borderline drowning in an immersive software engineering course.
I really love Ruby on Rails and although the first day of learning this new framework; I thought what the heck is going on, by day 3, I thought wow this is amazing! Looking back at how much I hated Mod 1 of Ruby, I understand why it was taught first. Moving into Rails and seeing how much less key strokes are needed to get the same outcome, it’s important to understand what’s happening beyond what we physically see. Learning Rails gave me a much better understanding of ActiveRecord and what it really does for us as software engineers(well eventually I will be one right!?). Yet I did notice on my googling adventures the dates of a lot of the resources that help with Ruby. A lot of it was written before 2018, and in addition to noticing these dates, I often heard things like “Ruby is a dead language”, “No one uses Ruby anymore”, “There’s no jobs for Ruby developers.” I couldn’t help but wonder why not?? I know I’m not the only person who really enjoys this language and sees how efficient it can be when creating an application!
So yeah….we all have smart phones and all those smart phones have apps but those apps are built with languages like Java and Python. Before delving into in tech, when I heard the word app, I immediately thought of an app on my phone but it wasn’t until my time at Flatiron that I found out that is not the case. The internet is an application, the websites we interact with daily are applications, the dashboard in cars now are basically applications, even refrigerators have applications in them! Ruby on Rails is especially great for web applications.
One of the things I love about Ruby on Rails is how quickly you can make a basic functioning web application in probably a day or two or three, breaks are very very necessary. My partner and I were able to build a beautiful and fully functioning web application in one week, considering all the errors we had to work through, it could’ve been in 3 days! Writing all the code to make our app functional probably took us about 2 days and things like Rails g resource, Helper methods, Before_action, Validations, ActiveRecord, Params, all saved time of having to write a bunch of code.
Apps like Twitter got their start using Ruby on Rails but it eventually switched their backend over to Java and Scala. This was because of scalability issues, what do we mean by scalability? Scalability is all about handling growth. A successful web application needs to seamlessly and efficiently accommodate growth, and be designed with that in mind. A scalable application will be able to handle an increase in users and load, without disrupting the end users. Twitter does still use RoR for frontend ,not confirmed though. But there’s still web apps we use today that are built using Ruby on Rails.
- Github - Repository Hosting Service
- Shopify- eCommerce Solution
- Basecamp - Project Management System
- Airbnb - Hospitality Service
- Dribble- Network for Technical Designers
- Goodreads - Network for book readers
- Kickstarter - Crowd Funding
- Podomatic - Podcasting Service
- Fiverr - Network for Freelancers
- Bleacher Report - Sports News
- Moda Operandi - Luxury Retail Site
So I disagree that Ruby, Ruby on Rails is a dead language, according to Netguru, in December of 2019, there was 1334 Rails developer positions just in the Bay Area alone. Ruby 2.7 had a minor update last year that increased it’s performance to some degree but at the end of this year Ruby 3.0 is expected to include updates such as performance optimization which will help with memory usage, static analysis which will give developers an additional check-up to their code. And my most favorite, backward compatibility which will make switching from previous versions of Ruby to new ones much easier! Check out Prograils.com for more features coming with Ruby 3.0 !
