learn-ruby VS Hanami

More consistent learning. The job search also gave me a chance to get back to my Ruby/web development learning roadmap. I realized that at my last job, I wasn't consistently spending time improving my skills, outside of whatever I might (if I was lucky) be learning in work projects. It's just hard to fight against the pressure of the day-to-day work. Here are some approaches that I'll try this time around: Disregard immediate applicability and learn something I'm interested in for the sake of expanding my mind. Right now that's learning functional programming. Learn actively, whether by contributing to Exercism's Ruby track, building a collection of Ruby code katas, or maybe even creating a text-based game.

Beyond these basics, I've put together a list of my favorite Ruby/Rails learning resources.

I made the Git list by (1) scouring the Web for recommended resources, then (2) trying out each one to see if it would be worth going through to the end. In case you're curious about which resources didn't make the cut, here's the commit where they are removed.

As a guide to my reflections today, I'll use my "Learning Ruby" roadmap, which originally arose out of the chaos of my bookmark hell, where I was having trouble keeping track of the actually important learning resources. The roadmap worked well for me and eventually I put it up on GitHub because making it public gives me more motivation to keep making progress.

For me, Ruby was a great choice for a career change. I used to be a teacher until I quit in 2020, then over the next 1.5 years I studied and practiced part-time, while working full-time in a remote customer support job. Ever since I started learning Ruby, I've saved my favorite learning resources here: https://github.com/fpsvogel/learn-ruby. Many of them are free.

So I've set out to explore the problem of organizing business logic from more angles than before, using the resources listed below. These lists are excerpted from my "Learning Ruby" road map which I often update, so you may want to find these lists there if this post is old at the time of your reading it. The sections corresponding to the lists below are, at the time of writing, "Rails architecture" and "Rails codebases".

For more resources, here's my list of my favorites: https://github.com/fpsvogel/learn-ruby

I'll tell my story and you can decide if it resonates with you at all. Also these might help you: my Ruby roadmap (favorite learning resources), and my blog post "How to find your first Rails job".

I've made a big list of my favorite learning resources, but here are some possible first steps:

I actually don't know of a good "beyond the basics" Rails course. The one or two that I've seen out there are prohibitively expensive. For me the best way forward has been to improve in specific areas, such as OOP, testing, and SQL basics. I've made a list of my favorite resources in each area, which might help you.

With a clean architectural design and a primary object methodology, Hanami is counted among the best ruby frameworks that have gained popularity as an alternative to Rails. Hanami is “sorted” in design and provides small files that can be used independently to create a project stack. Hanami is lightweight and consumes fewer resources claiming 60% lesser memory than other big Ruby frameworks.

No, it's just no longer over-hyped. Ruby is settling into being a mature production language, similar to Python, Java, .NET, C++, etc. As you can see from the RedMonk 2023 data Ruby is very much still alive with tons of repositories on GitHub. Besides Shopify, GitHub is another big Ruby/Rails shop. Also, besides Rails, there are other new and upcoming projects like Hanami, DragonRuby, and Ronin.

Hanami 2 (hanamirb.org)

On all my application tutorials I start by setting up an application level REPL, it's basically a console script that loads all the files inside your project, if you're using a framework like Ruby on Rails or Hanami you already have a console by running the command console also.

This is something that kind of annoys me; there's even a /r/rails sub-reddit specifically for Ruby on Rails stuff. Understandably Rails helped put Ruby on the map. Before Rails, Ruby was just another fringe language. Rails became massively popular, helped many startups quickly build their Web 2.0 sites, and become successful companies (ex: GitHub, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc). Like others have said, "Rails is where the money is at". However, this posses a problem for the Ruby community: whenever Rails becomes less popular, so does Ruby. I wish the Ruby ecosystem wasn't so heavily centralized around Rails, and that we diversified our uses of Ruby a bit. There's of course Sinatra, dry-rb, Hanami, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, and a dozen security tools written in Ruby such as Metasploit, BeFF, Arachni, and Ronin.

Welcome! Ruby isn't exactly "dying", but the hype/popularity is definitely fading. This is primarily because Ruby is no longer "new", most of Ruby's popularity came from Rails, and now Rails is no longer the "new hotness". However, Ruby still has lots of awesome features and lots of awesome other libraries and frameworks, such as the new fancy irb gem that uses reline, nokogiri, chunky_png, the async gems, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, Ronin, and the new Hanami web framework.

Data Oriented Web Development with Ruby (upcoming book) by Peter Solnica, who is on the Hanami core team. Learning Hanami wouldn't be a bad idea either.

After about 5 laps around Clean architecture since I came across hanami/hanami: The web, with simplicity., I'm finally getting it down in my gut, so I'll summarize.

View on GitHub

If it’s just an issue with Rails, then might I suggest looking at https://hanamirb.org - it’s a framework, but one built from the lessons learned from rails and all who followed.