Journey Alternatives

journey reviews and mentions

• Welcome to Rails Cheat Sheet
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 May 2023

  I went all in many years ago and then moved on several years ago (to different parts of the stack that I found more interesting), but here's my 2c FWIW.

  The Rails Guides [1] are quite good. The "Getting Started" guide, in particular, was my first intro to Rails, and it's what convinced me to go all in — I built my entire prototype by just following along the guide, seeing what they were doing with their toy app, and then trying to whatever similar thing I needed in my prototype.

  Coming from Python, the magic was distasteful to me, too. Rails adds a ton more magic on top — so, eventually, when I set aside Rails and just spent time with Ruby (writing scripts or what not), I realized I loved Ruby the language much more than Rails the framework (and all its baggage).

  Stripping Rails down to its API-only mode (though it was a bit rough around the edges last I tried) got me closer to the lovable-Ruby of it all. Sinatra turned out to be a delightful little framework (though sadly I never got a chance to use it much). And, even though I've now moved on from Rails, I still like Ruby as a go-to scripting language — it's delightfully easy to throw together a quick shell script or some data analysis, and it's very friendly to a functional programming style.

  I guess what I'm saying is: You're not alone. Many people in the Rails community agree that there's a ton of hidden magic, sometimes too much [2]. But underneath it all is a delightful programming language.

  [1]: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/

  [2]: The documentation for the Rails routing layer, Journey, is my favorite example of this: https://github.com/rails/journey#label-SYNOPSIS-3A