01 Aug 2022
This newsletter went out via email to the Hotwiring Rails subscriber list, but I know that not everyone wants another email cluttering up their inbox. For those folks, I’ll always publish the full content of the newletter here too, so you can get all the content with none of the emails.
Thoughts or feedback on how I can make this newsletter more valuable? Have something you’d like to include in next month’s edition? Send me an email, or find me on Twitter.
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Seven-minute read
30 Jul 2022
The article below is on a topic that has bothered me for a long time — the lack of opportunity for junior Rails developers — spurred by some recent Twitter energy around Ruby on Rails being “back”. I got mentioned in one of the viral threads about Rails being back which jump started my brain into writing this article, but I don’t write it to admonish folks who are excited about Rails and want to bring in more Rails developers with educational content. I love that work, and appreciate the positive energy, and the commitment to building great content. The Rails is back energy just happened to kick off this train of thought about what the long term outlook of the Rails world is when there are few paths for folks to make their living as junior Rails developers.
2022 is an exciting time for Rails developers.
The release of Rails 7 brought Hotwire into the default Rails package along with new asset bundling solutions to get applications off of the dreaded Webpacker. For fans of Redis, the new Kredis gem is a suggested default for Rails 7 applications, offering tools to make it easier for Rails devs to do fun stuff with Redis.
Outside of officially endorsed Rails projects, the StimulusReflex team is steadily making improvements to StimulusReflex, CableReady, and the related set of projects that make building modern, reactive applications in Rails easier than ever.
Despite all of that excitement, folks in the Rails community have gotten used to dealing with “Is Rails dead? Rails is dead.” questions and comments that discourage developers from choosing Rails for their next project.
“Is Rails dead?” questions are silly if you spend any time keeping up with the Rails ecosystem. Rails isn’t dead, it is alive and kicking, just like it has been for nearly 2 decades. Many billions of dollars have been earned riding the Rails and new businesses continue to be built on the foundation that Rails provides.
As a reaction to “Is Rails dead?”, Rails enthusiasts are leaning into a “Rails is back!” narrative — we aren’t dead, we’ve got all this cool new stuff to share!
I don’t think the noise of “Rails is dead!” and “Rails is back” is particularly interesting. Neither narrative adds any value to the conversation. As a Rails enthusiast (and sometime Rails content creator), I love the idea of “Rails is back”, but I don’t think it gets us where we are trying to go.
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Eight-minute read
18 Jul 2022
Writing about what you learn, when done well, is a great way to solidify your own knowledge of a topic, stretch yourself professionally, and establish credibility in your field.
In 2020, I started writing tutorial-style articles for Ruby on Rails developers. Writing these articles began as a fun distraction from a stressful job, and as a way to reconnect with web development as a discipline as my day job pulled me further away from regularly writing code. From that beginning as a distracting hobby, I grew to have a passion for writing tutorials as a way to share my knowledge with internet strangers.
Over the last 18 months, my writing has helped me grow my professional network, find new consulting clients, earn a few thousand dollars in (self-published) book sales, and to feel much more confident in my technical skills.
As I’ve worked to improve my own writing, I have read many, many articles from other developers. Many of those articles have been valuable but I also see very common, correctable mistakes from folks who have knowledge to share but struggle with sharing that knowledge effectively.
Today, I’m sharing some of the most common mistakes I see tutorial writers make and how to correct those mistakes to write more effective tutorials. I will also share the simple formula I use when writing new tutorials.
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13-minute read