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by neomindryan 95 days ago
We've been running Rails apps in production continuously since 2007. If you treat software as anything other than completely disposable, it's been a no-brainer for the entire 19+ years I've been paying attention (not despite its age, but because of it).

The premise that you get meaningful efficiencies from JavaScript on the back-end just because you have to use it on the front-end has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Instead you mostly get a larger blast radius when the front-end ecosystem has its monthly identity crisis. OP's "stacks-du-jour" and programming language "flavour of the month" framing is exactly right. A shocking amount of web software architecture is just following fashion trends dressed up as technical decision-making.

Most of the churn in tech stack isn't driven by engineering requirements, it's driven by résumé optimization and Hacker News anxiety. Rails has quietly been powering serious businesses the whole time. Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?
2 comments
pqdbr 95 days ago
We've also been running Rails in production for 15+ years (since 2011) in two companies and it has been serving us greatly. Hiring is tough, but I definitely believe the stack makes up for it due to the productivity gains.

In late 2025 we decided to migrate one of them to Inertia. Public facing pages is already done, and we're 80% through migrating the logged in area (it's a huge app). We choose Vue.js.

It's amazing how powerful this stack is and how little you have to change in the backend.

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sodapopcan 95 days ago
I'm surprised hiring is tough. The job market is such trash rn and I feel there are a lot of Rubyists, or ex-Rubists interested in returning to it, around. Maybe not? (Edit: spelling)
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shevy-java 95 days ago
> Maybe not?

Because there are fewer and fewer ruby/rails people available.

It is the simplest explanation - and the one that makes the most sense, too.

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sodapopcan 95 days ago
Well ya, I'm just saying I'm surprised considering the current job market. I moved on from Rails about 5 years ago now, but have 9 years experience under my belt and still keep up a bit with new things and play with them once in a while. And yet I've applied for several Rails positions in the past few years and always get an outright rejection.
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peter-boling 93 days ago
I'm availabe! On rails for over 21 years since version zero. It's strange, but true, that we Rails-devs are hard to find. I apply for Rails-related roles and am competing with over 1,000 other resumes. I'm not sure how I fail to even get a screening call 99% of the time. Perhaps overqualified? Perhaps poor filtering? It is a very strange job market.
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shevy-java 95 days ago
> Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?

It means that there are many more people using NPM.

That means more users. More users is almost always better, for any language.

Also many of those gems on rubygems are dead since decades, literally. Probably also for NPM. We can not just compare the numbers without analysis.

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