00:00:16.800
We were somewhere near Montana on Amtrak
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when the caffeine began to take hold.
00:00:21.359
The sun was rising, the Wi-Fi was
00:00:23.439
non-existent, and someone had just
00:00:25.439
managed to boot a Rails app at 75 mph.
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16 of us, laptops open, Rails apps
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booting in a moving train car in route
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to the very first Rails comp and we were
00:00:37.120
all in on this new framework. But we'll
00:00:39.440
come back to this ride later. Today I'm
00:00:41.200
going to take you on a little bit of a
00:00:42.160
trip. So Rails has been around for over
00:00:44.079
21 years now and in that time it's
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introduced a lot of features. Some we
00:00:48.079
still use to this day, some we've
00:00:49.920
forgotten about, some maybe we wish we
00:00:51.520
could forget about. But together they
00:00:53.280
tell a story not just of the framework
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but of the community behind it. Rails
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has always moved fast. It's held strong
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opinions. It has bold defaults and has
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made the occasional curious detour.
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Today, we're going to take a ride
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through some of that history. Today,
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we'll make a few stops along the way.
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Some will feel familiar. Others might
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bring back some memories, but this isn't
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about pointing fingers or poking fun.
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It's about understanding how Rails has
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evolved and how it's helped us evolve as
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developers, too. So, here's how this is
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going to work. I'm going to take us
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through a handful of stops, moments in
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Rails histories that mark big ideas, big
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swings, or maybe just some big
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personalities.
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Some features we still love, some we
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quietly extracted. And some newer
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developers stumble across in our
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codebases like they're artifacts from a
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forgotten civilization.
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And in the spirit of Rails itself, we'll
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keep moving. So grab your bags and hop
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on board. We're headed back where things
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started clicking. a time when Rails gave
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us structure, momentum, and maybe even a
00:01:51.759
little bit of magic. So, let's roll into
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stop one where we jumped on board.
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This was a This is where Rails hooked
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us. You could scaffold the model,
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validate some user input, set up a few
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relationships, and run your test all in
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the first hour or 15 minutes if you were
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making a blog. The defaults were smart,
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the opinions were helpful, and the
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feedback loop was lightning quick. It
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felt like the framework truly wanted us
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to succeed.
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Now, these features didn't just save us
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time. They made building joyful.
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Now, one of Rails's biggest
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contributions wasn't a method or a
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class. It was a philosophy.
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You didn't need a giant XML file to
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explain where your uh models or
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controllers live and you just built your
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app and it worked. That shift saved us
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from so much boiler plate and let us
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focus on building features, not on
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wiring things together. Now, active
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record is arguably the most iconic piece
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of Rails. The name itself comes from
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Martin Fowler's book, Patterns of
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Enterprise Application Architecture. But
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in Rails, it wasn't just a pattern. It
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was the default way of getting
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done. With active record, you could
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write user.post and you weren't thinking
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about foreign keys or join tables. You
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were thinking about what your user
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wanted to connect to. It made your data
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feel live, not just some mysterious data
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stored in a hash cache in the cloud.
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Now, I feel like I should provide some
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context for what developers were
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navigating during this era. For example,
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if you're using Java or M Hibernate
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around this time, here's kind of a
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highle overview of what would go into
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that. Disclaimer, these are my best
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examples I can find from the 2004 era of
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hibernate. But here's an equivalent of a
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domain object say in hibernate for say
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an article. You got your you define your
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getters, your setters, you could have a
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title body, author, and then there's
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this thing called a hibernate mapping
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XML file which is where you'd map your
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Java class files to corresponding
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database columns. This is where you
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define one to many or many to one
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relationships.
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Then to interact with this in your app,
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uh you'd then use these setters and
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you'd save your data in the database.
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Now you might be thinking that doesn't
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actually look all that bad, right? It's
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only like four or five lines of code.
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But what happened if it didn't actually
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successfully save? For example, if you
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had a unique constraint on an article,
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you need to handle the types of
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exceptions and any other data
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validations. We needed to write quite a
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bit of code for that business logic. And
00:04:25.360
then one day, active record arrived.
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We didn't need needed to define all
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those getters and setters. No
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configuration. We could just toss in a
00:04:33.280
few validations and in a few lines of
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Ruby code. We were confident adhering to
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our application's business logic without
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needing to wire up very much. Less
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boilerplate, less ceremony, more joy.
00:04:44.960
Active record wasn't just simpler, it
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felt human because Rails invited us to
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write code that spoke clearly about what
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we wanted it to achieve.
00:04:54.560
In my opinion, Rails console might be
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one of the most quietly powerful tools
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in the whole framework. You could poke
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around your app, run queries, debug some
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weirdness, no browser needed, no break
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points, no scaffolding a controller just
00:05:06.800
to test something out. And when things
00:05:08.639
went sideway in production, it was there
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for you, too. We can investigate issues
00:05:12.639
on our servers, log in, fix a data issue
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without having to redeploy our
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application. That shrunk the feedback
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loop. It built up our confidence in
00:05:20.800
understanding how this Ruby and Rails
00:05:22.479
thing all kind of worked at the time.
00:05:24.560
Now, before Rails, managing database
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meant editing a bunch of SQL files,
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typically writing altered table
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statements, saving them in a shared
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folder, maybe emailing them around with
00:05:33.440
your co-workers. You never really knew
00:05:35.039
if a change had been run in production
00:05:37.440
yet. It was a very clunky era of
00:05:40.720
database management. We push changes
00:05:42.720
production or schema changes was clunky.
00:05:44.639
And if you were working with the DBA,
00:05:46.240
you probably had a pretty slow review
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loop too. Rollbacks if you were lucky.
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Active record integrations changed all
00:05:52.400
that. Now schema changes were versioned
00:05:54.800
and lived in our source control and you
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can run them with just one command and
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this built up our confidence that the
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local and production environment schemas
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were kind of aligned. Now Rails didn't
00:06:04.080
just support testing, it kind of
00:06:05.440
expected it. When you generated a model,
00:06:07.680
it created a test file and a fixtures.
00:06:10.319
No setup, no configuration, just some
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encouragement that helped establish a
00:06:14.479
habit. Teams started writing tests
00:06:16.720
earlier and more often. And once testing
00:06:19.360
became more normal, we had some
00:06:21.199
cognitive bandwidth and started
00:06:22.400
imagining maybe some new ways of
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thinking about testing and that led to
00:06:25.360
things like RSpec and BDD whether you
00:06:27.280
like them or not. But Rails never forced
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you to write tests. It just made it
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really easy to get started.
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Provi Rails provided us with a bunch of
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helpers that quietly made our apps feel
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polished requiring very little effort on
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our parts. You didn't need to write a
00:06:41.120
bunch of custom logic for string
00:06:42.639
truncation, currency formatting,
00:06:45.039
thinking about pluralization. For
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example, in PHP around this era, it
00:06:48.720
wasn't horrible. You could probably make
00:06:50.080
a function for this or something, but it
00:06:51.520
was kind of quite verbose to handle
00:06:53.039
things like that. And then contrast that
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with Rails, these small little
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conveniences added up. They cleaned up
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our views. They made our apps more
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consistent. And they made it easier for
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teams to read and maintain each other's
00:07:03.919
codebase and gave me kind of a business
00:07:05.440
model. Now, one of the most thoughtful
00:07:07.440
parts of Rails has always been how it's
00:07:09.440
helped us speak to our users. Use error.
00:07:13.039
messages gives us friendly human
00:07:15.919
readable validation messages without
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requiring us to write a bunch of if
00:07:19.840
field blank add error then if error
00:07:22.479
display error just built into the stack
00:07:25.280
and that flash hash it gave us a
00:07:27.759
built-in way to communicate success and
00:07:29.520
information and failures between
00:07:30.880
requests helpers weren't flashy but they
00:07:34.000
saved us time simplified our views and
00:07:36.800
again helped us create much better user
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experiences with such little effort on
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our part
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rails gave us a lot of thoughtful tools
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early on. A lot of those things still
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exist to this. All of those things still
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exist and it doesn't look that much
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different. But these things made
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building web apps feel joyful and fast.
00:07:54.960
But not every feature stuck around. Some
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are experiments, some didn't age well,
00:07:59.360
and some just didn't work out the way
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that we hoped they would.
00:08:03.280
Welcome to the quietest stuff. This is
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where Rails features arrive with
00:08:07.039
purpose. sometimes even with fanfare,
00:08:10.400
but over time they prove to maybe not be
00:08:12.319
quite the right fit. Some we've quietly
00:08:14.400
extracted or maybe they've faded from
00:08:16.160
memory. Who here remembers active
00:08:18.800
resource?
00:08:20.960
Let me see your hands. Who used active
00:08:23.039
resource in production?
00:08:25.199
Okay, who's still using active record in
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production?
00:08:29.919
Active res resource. Okay, one. Okay,
00:08:33.360
thank you.
00:08:35.839
So active resource was ambitious. This
00:08:38.080
was a Rails attempt to make one app talk
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to another over HTTP. Not a super novel
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idea in in the modern time, but treating
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basically a remote API like it was an
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active record model. In theory, it was
00:08:48.080
beautiful. You could just write invoice
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fine and Rails would make a rest call
00:08:51.360
under the hood. It worked quite nicely
00:08:55.519
when we owned our own APIs. Active
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record or active resource let us pretend
00:09:01.279
that we had a distributed active record.
00:09:03.360
But in the real world, other people are
00:09:05.519
hell and other people's APIs aren't
00:09:06.959
quite so polite. They rate limit you.
00:09:09.120
They return weird error messages and
00:09:10.720
they change their formats midweek.
00:09:12.480
Things go up flip upside down. And
00:09:15.120
eventually was like Rails was like,
00:09:16.480
you're probably going to want to handle
00:09:17.360
this yourself. Today, we lean on things
00:09:19.120
like Faraday or HTTP party to build our
00:09:22.000
own API clients for our Rails apps.
00:09:25.600
Active record observers allowed us to
00:09:27.920
extract all these side effect callbacks
00:09:30.480
from our models and move them into some
00:09:32.560
other class.
00:09:34.320
It sounded cleaner for a while,
00:09:36.080
especially, for example, if you had like
00:09:37.600
an invoice and you wanted to sync it to
00:09:39.120
QuickBooks, but you didn't want the
00:09:40.240
invoice model to really know that
00:09:41.600
QuickBooks existed. You could do that.
00:09:43.600
You could have multiple observers
00:09:44.959
observing the same model. Got a little
00:09:46.959
crazy. You could save a record, update
00:09:49.040
records records, and something else
00:09:51.120
would happen somewhere else. But but
00:09:52.880
where you'd have to re-reference your
00:09:55.279
environment files to figure out which
00:09:57.200
ones were loaded and which environment
00:09:59.120
what order they were being loaded in
00:10:01.040
practice was a little implicit maybe not
00:10:03.279
widely used or understood difficult to
00:10:05.680
debug and it fell out of favor was
00:10:07.760
extracted in Rails 4. Page and action
00:10:10.720
caching were early attempts to speed up
00:10:12.640
our Rails apps by skipping the
00:10:14.000
controller entirely. Fastest Rails app
00:10:16.800
is no Rails app I think. Um for example,
00:10:19.519
we might want to cache our articles. So
00:10:21.519
we'd call caches page in our controller
00:10:24.160
and with page caching, Rails would write
00:10:26.560
the full HTML to the public directory on
00:10:29.120
our app servers. So then there would be
00:10:30.720
HTML file and then on a subsequent
00:10:32.800
request, Apache or EngineX would then
00:10:34.880
serve that file without needing to hit
00:10:37.120
Rails. It was fast. It was also brittle.
00:10:39.760
If one partial changed, you had to
00:10:41.519
expire the whole page or manually delete
00:10:43.440
files in your servers. A lot of us had
00:10:45.279
multiple app servers. So we had a lot of
00:10:47.040
HTML files that were regularly trying to
00:10:49.040
delete and keep cleaned and figuring out
00:10:50.560
where the cache was broken. This is
00:10:52.640
before we had tools like memcache or
00:10:54.399
Reddus readily available. So Rails did
00:10:57.040
what it could with the file system. But
00:10:58.640
our apps got a little bit more dynamic.
00:11:00.399
The approach didn't quite hold up so
00:11:01.680
well. These caching features were
00:11:03.360
extracted and now we might look at using
00:11:04.880
things like Russian doll caching in
00:11:07.120
Reddus or solid cache. Early Rails had
00:11:10.160
something called dynamic scaffolding.
00:11:11.600
You just drop in scaffold invoices, no
00:11:13.760
files, no views. Rails would just
00:11:16.000
autogenerate the credit interface at
00:11:17.519
runtime. It was magical or maybe a cool
00:11:20.800
parlor trick until because because
00:11:24.240
until you needed to change something, it
00:11:25.920
was a little tricky because you had
00:11:27.440
there was nothing actually changed
00:11:28.720
because it was automatically generated
00:11:30.160
in real time. So, Rails tended to also
00:11:42.079
gave us adder accessible to protect
00:11:43.600
against mass attribute assignment. You'd
00:11:45.839
whitelist which attributes could be
00:11:47.600
updated and where. For example, let's
00:11:49.279
say you had editorial workflow where
00:11:51.279
writers could draft an article, but only
00:11:53.360
an editor could publish it. So, we use
00:11:55.440
adder accessible and our models for each
00:11:57.040
role and our controllers. you'd have to
00:11:58.959
pass that role context when we'd call
00:12:01.360
active record um to save our records and
00:12:04.000
stuff like that. It was simple but our
00:12:06.079
apps tended to get a little more
00:12:07.040
complicated and a lot of teams were
00:12:08.399
growing and so suddenly tracking which
00:12:10.240
fields were being used exposed and where
00:12:12.480
got a little confusing and so in Rails 4
00:12:14.800
we got strong parameters and moved that
00:12:16.480
logic into the controller where it was
00:12:18.959
arguably easier to see and manage. Some
00:12:21.360
folks didn't love this change at the
00:12:22.720
time because it was challenging the
00:12:24.480
skinny controller fat model mindset, but
00:12:27.200
I think it was a thoughtful mind
00:12:28.959
thoughtful shift. It's more explicit,
00:12:30.880
more transparent, and a little safer for
00:12:33.040
teams that are growing quickly. Now,
00:12:35.040
these weren't failures. These were
00:12:36.639
experiments. Rails trying to abstract,
00:12:38.880
to simplify, to be clever. But at our
00:12:41.519
next stop, Rails gets a little bit more
00:12:43.200
playful.
00:12:46.320
This is the stretch of track where Rails
00:12:48.160
got even whimsical.
00:12:52.399
Because it wasn't just about
00:12:53.279
productivity, it was about delighting
00:12:55.040
ourselves, at least if anyone. Helpers
00:12:57.120
that dance, features that felt like
00:12:58.880
magic spells, clever, curious ideas that
00:13:01.600
made us pause and smile. Some of these
00:13:03.839
features were genuinely helpful when
00:13:05.839
they came out. Others made things a
00:13:07.360
little harder to understand in long run,
00:13:09.200
but the but at the time they felt like
00:13:10.720
it was one of our secret weapons.
00:13:13.600
There was this time in Rails when we
00:13:15.120
wrote JavaScript with Ruby. With RJS
00:13:17.920
templates, your controllers would
00:13:18.959
respond by rendering Ruby that would
00:13:20.720
then output JavaScript. The important
00:13:22.560
part was that we weren't writing
00:13:24.480
JavaScript. You're just asking Rails to
00:13:26.560
write it for you. Um,
00:13:31.760
we also had features like button to and
00:13:33.519
link to function. You weren't linking to
00:13:35.839
a URL. You were linking to a JavaScript
00:13:37.760
function. It was fast. It felt powerful
00:13:40.079
at the time and it worked on most
00:13:41.680
browsers and except for maybe some IE
00:13:44.160
situations. But as our apps grew, our
00:13:46.800
view started to get kind of messy. We
00:13:48.880
also had observe field which made our
00:13:51.040
apps feel futuristic, at least for 2006
00:13:53.440
era. We used it for live search,
00:13:55.600
autocomplete, tagging, you name it. For
00:13:58.079
example, let's say we had a text field
00:14:00.240
and we wanted to watch for user input
00:14:02.000
every half second or so. That would fire
00:14:04.079
off an Ajax request to a controller. We
00:14:06.880
could have that return a partial to
00:14:08.399
render in our search results. No SPA
00:14:10.720
needed. We had no build tooling, no gem
00:14:12.880
files. This was all vanilla Rails. You
00:14:15.120
could do all this. We loved that power.
00:14:17.120
And we eventually also learned how to
00:14:18.959
let things go once we as a community
00:14:21.120
started to embrace unobtrusive
00:14:22.480
JavaScript. Scriptaculus
00:14:25.519
brought us animations and visual effects
00:14:27.760
to our early Rails apps that made it us
00:14:29.839
feel so powerful. You could build
00:14:31.839
shopping carts with literal drag and
00:14:33.519
drop functionality. I remember being at
00:14:35.199
a conference and seeing someone
00:14:36.560
literally dragging a t-shirt into a
00:14:38.160
shopping cart. I'm like, we all need
00:14:40.079
that. That's like that's the future of
00:14:42.480
buying on the internet is dragging to
00:14:44.639
the thing instead of clicking add to
00:14:46.720
cart.
00:14:48.560
It's funny how things kind of reverb.
00:14:50.639
Anyways,
00:14:52.240
for a while this was pure, you know,
00:14:54.480
crack cocaine for us backend developers
00:14:56.720
that were getting a little crazy with
00:14:58.160
our JavaScript, but it was there. But as
00:15:02.000
JavaScript, as a JavaScript ecosystem
00:15:04.000
evolved, Rails decided to step back.
00:15:06.639
These effects weren't removed from being
00:15:08.800
included with Rails because they were
00:15:10.160
bad or anything. They just didn't need
00:15:12.000
to be bundled by default anymore.
00:15:15.680
We're always waiting on JavaScript
00:15:18.079
things to this is that was 2006. All
00:15:20.880
right. One of the early early Rails
00:15:23.440
superpowers was you could just write
00:15:25.199
invoice. Customer code and underscore
00:15:27.680
number and it would just magically work.
00:15:30.240
These were called dynamic finders,
00:15:32.160
method names that would turn into these
00:15:33.600
queries for you. You didn't have to
00:15:35.120
write the SQL which was what we were
00:15:36.720
trying to avoid as much as we could. You
00:15:38.639
didn't need to configure anything but
00:15:40.399
method name started to get kind of long
00:15:42.399
started wrapping and our queries tended
00:15:44.399
to get a little more complicated than
00:15:45.600
this. It's probably Rails doing a little
00:15:47.839
bit too much behind the curtain. So we
00:15:49.680
stepped back. Now we have explicit find
00:15:51.680
by wear conditions and use name scopes.
00:15:54.240
At the time Rails was giving us
00:15:55.600
something easy to reach for to keep it
00:15:57.680
readable. But as you can see we were
00:15:59.199
also very verbose with our attribute
00:16:00.720
names. So it made these method names
00:16:02.160
really freaking long.
00:16:04.240
And here's one you might not believe,
00:16:06.079
but Rails briefly supported semicolon
00:16:08.240
delimited actions. What the does
00:16:10.399
that mean? Like SLbooks ID
00:16:13.199
semicolonedit.
00:16:14.720
This is this approach was inspired by
00:16:16.480
the Java server specs, something called
00:16:18.959
matrix parameters.
00:16:21.040
The idea is super simple. All right. So
00:16:23.600
each segment of a URL path could carry
00:16:26.560
its own metadata. Got it? You
00:16:29.680
understand? Was that make sense? Anyone
00:16:32.079
know how to read that? All right, Rails
00:16:34.399
didn't go this deep with it, but this
00:16:36.240
isn't the Java uh Java server specs. Uh
00:16:39.600
we had this in what Rails 1.1 and 1.2.
00:16:42.480
It basically let us insert these
00:16:43.759
semicolons in our routes to call custom
00:16:45.279
actions that didn't quite fit cleanly
00:16:47.519
into REST. And the idea was to
00:16:50.160
discourage RPC style actions. I'm just
00:16:52.320
re reading verbatim what I read on some
00:16:54.079
track post. Um track SBN was our old
00:16:58.000
Rails uh place to deal with issues back
00:17:01.199
then. Also, you can't find that stuff
00:17:03.040
and left out using the internet archive.
00:17:04.799
So, thankful that that exists. But this
00:17:07.039
confused a lot of devs like myself.
00:17:09.199
Broken Safari and we're quietly
00:17:11.439
extracted in Rails 2.0. As DH said at
00:17:14.880
the time, just not worth it. So, Rails
00:17:17.520
quietly let it go and we just embraced
00:17:19.439
the forward slash.
00:17:21.439
Rails gave us some strange, delightful,
00:17:23.199
and unusually clever ideas. They weren't
00:17:25.039
always perfect, but they sparked
00:17:27.199
curiosity and they left a mark. and
00:17:29.840
Rails, it doesn't forget. Some ideas
00:17:32.160
just need some time to come back around
00:17:33.919
because not everything in Rails is about
00:17:35.440
forward motion. Some of the most
00:17:37.360
interesting ideas in the framework are
00:17:39.039
the ones we've circled back to, refined,
00:17:41.760
renamed, and reimagined. These are the
00:17:44.240
loops, the moments where Rails said,
00:17:46.720
"Maybe we weren't wrong, we were just
00:17:49.120
weren't ready, or where the community
00:17:51.280
asked for a second or third time to try
00:17:53.120
something better."
00:17:55.039
Turbo is the latest stop in Rails's long
00:17:57.280
tradition of asking, can we make the
00:17:58.960
front end easier without going all in on
00:18:00.880
JavaScript? We've been trying to avoid
00:18:02.080
JavaScript forever. We've seen this
00:18:04.240
before. Remote true, unobtrusive
00:18:06.160
JavaScript, observed field. Turbo builds
00:18:08.799
on all those ideas, but with cleaner
00:18:10.400
structure, modern browser APIs, and a
00:18:12.720
bit more staying power. We hope it lets
00:18:15.440
us build fast interactive experiences
00:18:17.120
using mostly HTML, which is great,
00:18:19.039
especially for teams that want to say as
00:18:20.720
much as they can in the Rails mindset.
00:18:23.600
This is not Rails ignoring JavaScript
00:18:25.360
though. It's Rails simply saying HTML
00:18:28.320
might still be enough.
00:18:30.880
And this is the most important
00:18:32.160
refactoring I think of all time in
00:18:33.520
Rails. For a long time, we had form 4
00:18:35.840
and form tag and they worked, but they
00:18:38.480
also forced us to explain things like to
00:18:41.360
the junior dev. Well, this one's for
00:18:43.280
models. This one's not unless you pass
00:18:46.559
it a URL and then it sort of is super
00:18:49.280
easy. So even eventually Rails said
00:18:51.679
let's make this easier. So we got form
00:18:54.000
with one helper consistent behavior not
00:18:57.280
because the old way was broken but
00:18:58.880
because Rails keeps revisiting its
00:19:00.880
decisions and sometime sometimes the
00:19:03.200
kindest thing that we can do for our
00:19:04.720
future selves and developers is to
00:19:06.880
reduce friction and whenever we have an
00:19:08.960
opportunity to do so. Now when I first
00:19:11.600
pitched this talk I thought I'd be
00:19:13.120
digging through a trough of Rails
00:19:15.200
features that we could all be laughing
00:19:16.640
here about. you know, semicolon roots,
00:19:19.280
RJS, axis, hasslehoff. But the more I
00:19:22.320
look back, the more I realized that we
00:19:24.799
were never laughing at the code. We were
00:19:26.880
laughing with each other because Rails
00:19:29.360
took care of the hard stuff, the boiler
00:19:31.679
plate, the wiring. And that meant that
00:19:34.480
we had more mental space to think about
00:19:36.960
the product, to care about the user
00:19:39.520
experience, to argue about button copy
00:19:43.120
instead of database schemas. Rails
00:19:45.760
didn't just make us more productive. It
00:19:48.320
made us feel like we could build
00:19:49.919
anything. And it attracted people who
00:19:52.080
wanted to move fast, who cared about the
00:19:54.240
bigger picture, not just the code, but
00:19:56.400
what the code could do for us. So before
00:19:58.880
we roll into this immemoriam, it's the
00:20:01.280
second one of the day, I think. Let's
00:20:02.559
remember these features weren't just
00:20:03.919
tools. They were our momentum. Cue the
00:20:06.559
music.
00:20:12.559
Let's take a quiet moment to remember
00:20:14.080
the features that once lived in our
00:20:15.440
Rails apps. Some were brilliant,
00:20:21.600
some were brief, but all of them meant
00:20:24.160
well.
00:20:56.240
They may be gone from the framework, but
00:20:58.400
they live on in our git history,
00:21:02.159
in outdated blog posts,
00:21:04.799
and in the hearts of developers stuck
00:21:07.280
maintaining 2011 error code bases. May
00:21:10.320
they rest on rubygeems.org.
00:21:16.480
These weren't failures. They're
00:21:18.080
reminders that Rails is alive and always
00:21:21.039
learning.
00:21:28.400
Ideas return when the time is right. And
00:21:30.320
when they do, they come back lighter,
00:21:32.320
cleaner, and better shape for the world
00:21:34.320
that we're building in now. Remember
00:21:38.240
that train ride I mentioned? In 2006,
00:21:41.679
16 of us boarded the Amtrak in Portland,
00:21:44.000
Oregon, and took it to Chicago,
00:21:45.360
Illinois. A 48 hour ride to the very
00:21:48.640
first Rails Comp. No Wi-Fi, no iPhones
00:21:52.320
existed, no Git, no access to download
00:21:55.360
Ruby gems, only whatever we had saved in
00:21:57.760
our vendor folder, just laptop, script
00:22:00.559
server, console demos, and a cooler full
00:22:03.120
of questionable beverages.
00:22:05.760
But more than that, we had momentum, a
00:22:08.559
shared sense that something was about to
00:22:10.720
take off. And look at that kid.
00:22:16.320
Don't do it.
00:22:18.880
So, here we are at our final stop. But
00:22:20.880
if you've been on the Rails train for
00:22:22.400
any amount of time, you know there's no
00:22:23.600
true last stop because Rails keeps
00:22:25.520
moving. Not just adding, but editing.
00:22:29.120
Not just new ideas, better ones. This
00:22:32.240
whole ride we've been on, it's not been
00:22:34.159
about the features. It's been about how
00:22:35.360
Rails learns. Rails doesn't just move
00:22:37.679
forward. It loops. It reflects. It
00:22:39.520
circles back. Not out of nostalgia, but
00:22:41.679
with clear eyes. And that's rare. Most
00:22:44.480
frameworks chase trends. Rails asks,
00:22:46.799
"Where's the friction? And how can we
00:22:48.799
make it feel effortless again? Because
00:22:50.559
that's where the joy lives." And every
00:22:52.559
few years, something we thought was
00:22:54.320
essential starts to feel unnecessary.
00:22:57.600
A tool that used to save us time, now
00:22:59.919
it's slowing us down. a pattern that
00:23:02.159
seems so elegant now it's hard to
00:23:04.400
explain to the new hire. Rails has
00:23:06.720
taught us that these good defaults often
00:23:09.120
come from hardearned lessons. So the
00:23:11.919
question is what are we clinging on to
00:23:14.320
today that we're going to be laughing
00:23:16.000
about fondly in 5 years.
00:23:19.840
Rails doesn't need to be cool again. It
00:23:22.080
needs to be clear. Clear about what it
00:23:24.159
values. Clear about who it's for. And
00:23:26.799
clear that the joy of building isn't a
00:23:29.039
phase. It's the point.
00:23:32.080
Thank you.
00:23:34.480
If you've enjoyed the ride, please
00:23:35.919
remember to tip your conductor or at
00:23:38.799
least leave a good commit message.
00:23:40.559
Thanks for writing along with me today.
00:23:42.080
If you have any questions or want to
00:23:43.200
come say hi, come please see me around
00:23:44.960
the conference. And remember, it's okay
00:23:46.559
to laugh at your old code just as long
00:23:48.320
as you keep writing new code. Worth
00:23:49.600
laughing about someday. And before I
00:23:51.760
step off the stage, one last thing. I've
00:23:54.480
been collaborating with the Rails
00:23:55.440
Foundation on a new podcast. It's called
00:23:57.200
On Rails. We had one episode out with
00:23:59.039
Rosa that came out a week or two ago.
00:24:01.120
It's not about the hype or news. It's
00:24:03.039
about the real stuff. How teams actually
00:24:04.960
build, adapt, and keep their production
00:24:06.720
Rails apps running smoothly. This sounds
00:24:09.440
like your thing, I hope you give it a
00:24:10.559
listen. Thanks again.
