HN Explorer

Ask HN: What does the more intensive work in Rails/similar look like?

5 points by ashleypt ↗ HN
I've been learning Ruby on Rails and I've seen a lot of youtube videos of people building youtube and pinterest clones in like an hour or two.

What kind of work is done to diffrentiate from that? I'm curious what the more advanced workflows/projects look like. What work is airbnb or github doing?

it seems like a logarithm where you get a lot of results quickly and the rest is incremental improvements to get slightly better, or is it another pattern?

7 comments

[ 33.0 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] thread
axvk
As a project grows, scaling takes a lot of work. Adding a new feature means making sure that it works with all of the other features that are already there. Having millions of comments means you have to figure out how to implement caching correctly. And so on. It takes a lot of work to manage large codebases.
atmosx
You're probably referring to videos like this[1]. That wikipedia clone has very limited functionality and the interface is raw even for internal use. I took a quick-lap over it, I didn't notice the author writing tests and/or using JS.

Indeed Rails is extremely good for prototyping, but building an actual MVP (let alone a product) takes a lot more than that + there are more stages that have been ommited for very good reasons from that video-tutorial.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zNouhuKaVs

avitzurel
https://www.trip.com is 90% Rails I'd say. Everything you see on the surface is Rails.

As you grow, you do less of "belongs_to" and "has_many" and you do way more Ruby and way more Glue code that will work with all the models in the system and generate something for the user.

Scaling is a big issue, you constantly work around "best practices" that don't scale. (active-model-serialization for example) in favor of more fine-grained control over your models and data flow.

These days, the work is about 45-45-10, 45% you do APIs, 45% you do JS/React/etc... and 10% you do "Rails" (likely even less).

When the project grows, the monolithic nature of it starts to be a very big pain in the ass. We are moving more and more into services that do one thing well and not automatically include everything into the project.

Hope this answers your question

Tips: Forget Rails, Learn Ruby, HTTP, how things flow from the request to the response. Adopt universal best practices.

jamesmp98
"Forget Rails, Learn Ruby" I disagree, Ruby is mostly nothing without Rails. It's a great language, but otherwise has little usage when it comes down to getting a job.
avitzurel
Even though I disagree with you, I didn't explain myself correctly initially.

Rails is a framework. You are not a Rails engineer, you are a Ruby engineer.

I see this a lot with people that started with Rails, they don't understand the basics of Ruby and it's capabilities, they look for "Array comparison Rails" etc...

ashleypt
Thanks so much for posting!

This has inspired me to take my learning and future work far more seriously (along with reading war of art last night)

from now on my goal is to be an engineer and a businesswoman first and foremost, with the goal of being able to engineer quality products and systems for myself and freelance clients

from here im going to go through the odin project and focus on being well grounded in the fundamental principles and techs - no longer just a hobby and now i know to be at the top i will need a lot of grueling work

good thing i like react and js!

thx again :)

i think rails to start followed by some other stacks to see what best universal practices are

canadathrowm
Could you expand a little bit on the concept of active-model-serialization not scaling? Are you referring to the performance issues, or another problem?