The Ruby on Rails Community Survey has been collecting data from Rails developers since 2009. By sharing how you use Rails, you help the data we collect become more accurate and meaningful over time.
The survey asks questions like:
- How did you learn to code?
- How many Rails applications have you contributed to?
- How often do you contribute back to open source projects?
- Which Ruby gems frustrate you the most? (This is always a fun one.)
We appreciate your contribution to this survey! We had 2,000 completions when the survey last ran in 2018. Can you help us get to 2,500 in 2020? If you work on an engineering team, or participate in any local groups that use Rails, your shares are appreciated.
Thank you!
Top comments (9)
How did you learn to code?
It's been so long I can't remember what was the major contribution.
I was writing macros for Wordpress in 1998.
I was creating websites in 1999 with FrontPage
I was modding UT99 engine in 2001 and then a string of modding many different games.
How many Rails applications have you contributed to?
I started coding in Rails in 2005 on version 0.86 so I've coded on 50+ Rails applications.
How often do you contribute back to open source projects?
I contribute significant hours in bursts for a few months throughout the year.
Which Ruby gems frustrate you the most? (This is always a fun one.)
Nokogiri, because its the slowest gem to install that is required by default.
I don't know if this is is still relevant since Rails 6 but therubyracer or anything that depends on v8 lib.
+1 for Nokogiri, it's comical at this point how long it takes to install.
I first starting coding with Rails in 2017, and now it's a major part of my job for the past year and a half. My most recent frustrations with Rails has been Webpacker and the asset pipeline.
We are refactoring our specialized documentation platform built as a Rails app into a whitelisted gem executable that will take the path for documentation and boot up a fully featured and branded docs platform. Our biggest hurdles initially were namespacing, folder configuration and changing the default behavior that zeitwerk, the asset pipeline etc. expected. Once we figured that out though, the rest has been pretty straightforward.
Webpacker is my second largest compliant because I can no longer easily create a web-app.
Rails is supposed to be convention over configuration and I felt it broke the spirit of the framework when I could no longer easily just 'get going' and its the main reason I didn't upgrade my apps to Rails 6.
I completely relate to that.
I think the issue is a conceptual one. How do you integrate a second language's ecosystem of libraries, dependencies, etc. into a framework built primarily for the first language?
It used to be that you could accomplish everything for a full stack web app in Rails alone. You still can, truthfully, but a lot of clients, companies and consumers are expecting certain behavior that gets very challenging to duplicate without client-side JavaScript, and JavaScript has gone from a couple script tags to an entire universe of complexity, in and of itself.
Complicated stuff!
Nokogiri was most frequently named a "most frustrating" gem in the 2018 version of this survey! rails-hosting.com/2018/
Hi Andrew! Sorry for the confusion – would love if you answered these questions and more in the full survey, linked here and in the post! rails-hosting.com/
There was no confusion. I just wanted to publically share the questions you asked for passerbyers to encourage engagement.
Thanks so much for doing that, Andrew! Appreciate your thoughts here.
Great Idea, let me join in:
How did you learn to code?
I was surfing around the internet when I was ~ 13 years old and found some "hacking" sites. It was interesting how those tools, scripts and whatnot was build so I learned VB6 and C++
The time came where I needed to decide what I want to do after school so I started a training as application developer.
How many Rails applications have you contributed to?
Sadly, just one until now -
dev.to!Because I don't have many touching points with rails, this is the only one at the moment and enough to learn from.
Rails apps build by myself are less than 10 at the moment.
How often do you contribute back to open source projects?
I have a planned time slot once a week to contribute to an open source project.
Which Ruby gems frustrate you the most? (This is always a fun one.)
Since I don't have that much experience with Ruby right now, I can't point my finger to one gem.