| The article tries a little too hard to defend Rails. It has very legitimate scaling issues and they are well-documented. The author is also way too pessimistic about newer stacks and is demonstrating a grumpy-old-fart-like attitude saying that "new stacks will find new ways to jam CPUs or I/O stacks". Might be true, might be not. It's not a fact. I also get a vibe that the author exaggerates the problems with newer stacks. And it contains way too much assumptions in the case you switch stacks. So he says that if you migrate to Phoenix or Node.JS, then: (1) The load on the DB will not change. True, but Elixir has a cache directly inside the VM so the I/O costs for a _separate_ memcached server are almost fully eliminated right from the get go. (EDIT: in my not-so-big Elixir/Phoenix experience so far, Ecto is still faster than ActiveRecord; but I do still admit the DB load is pretty much the same.) (2) 20k RPM doesn't mandate 50 engineers. I've been in a team managing an app with a 12k RPM with only two senior devs. We were just fine for the 2 years I've been there. (3) New stacks slows down development. If you don't hire juniors, this is only true for the first 2-4 weeks. I've been fully onboarded in an umbrella Elixir app containing Phoenix and GraphQL endpoints, and a total of 6 apps, for 3 weeks. I surpassed my Rails development speed for 3 weeks. Very, very bogus assumption here. Assuming that switching a stack means you do cargo-cult engineering is disrespectful. Sure he might have seen it 200 times, doesn't mean the whole world does it. As much as I love Elixir, I was honest with myself and had to write a few small microservices in Go, and I am glad that I did because it was a perfect fit. I have a huge respect for Nate Berkopec and was following him closely for a while. He's a really awesome engineer. But that essay left me with a bitter taste of "my constultancy might be endangered, time to badmouth the new stacks". Why do I think so? Again, too many negative assumptions about the new stacks. No real argument, just negativity. Does Phoenix pose its own WTF moments when you migrate from Rails (or any other framework)? Sure! It absolutely does. No tech stack is perfect. The end result however is increased developer productivity -- speaking about myself and apparently thousands more out there on the internet who claim the same -- and less server costs. And these both were measured over time. If you want to use Rails, do so -- it is the perfect choice for a plethora of projects. But there is no need to badmouth alternatives especially if you don't have a case and your entire argument is comprised of negative assumptions about those alternatives. I am disappointed with the author. |