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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

I think it's that, and the general accessibility of Javascript. Before this JS craze you saw the same shit with PHP and Visual Basic, though for the most part people weren't trying to build and rebuild the same platforms nearly as much as now

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I know that it's 2008 calling, but seriously: when did Heroku, Github and the bundler/gem ecosystem stop qualifying as accessible? Deploying an MVP Rails app with sophisticated functionality is so effective that it still qualifies as erotic.

For me, the most compelling example of progress coming from the JS camp was my shallow investigation of the Expo platform for React Native. It has some genuinely sexy developer ergonomics features which I'd love to see make their way back into Rails.

I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.

True, any 15 year old framework will have bloat. But Rails is absolutely skinny compared to Spring, ASP and fellows. Its probably easier than a MEAN stack also.

That book is long, not because rails is bloated, but because there are very in depth sections building things from scratch like authentication that in practice are solved by gems. They are important for beginners to learn but are rarely reimplement from scratch in rails projects.

I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up.

Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy to be of service.

Hi, if you are interested in helping people with their ruby/rails issues, there is also reddit / ruby discord / rails slack / and stack overflow. I'm trying to be active on Reddit and the Discord but not very active on slack/stack overflow. There are already quite a few people helping but more people would help :).

Ta.

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