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Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why? |
Brian Shirai |
brixen |
If the only constant is change, as Heraclitus said, then we should constantly be trying to understand what's changing, why, and how it affects us.
The way we build, test, deploy, maintain, and support applications has changed a lot in the past five years. Containers, microservices, the growing number of connected devices (IoT, if you must), and the sorts of applications people are building with Ember, Angular, React and Meteor are big, not small, changes.
Containers, in particular, are intriguing because of how central they are becoming to much of what is changing about the application development landscape. At his recent keynote at MesosCon, Adrian Cockcroft showed the following slide when talking about adoption of Docker.
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How does Ruby and Rails fit into this rapidly changing landscape? If you search Google for "what companies use Ruby or Rails" there's not a lot of specific details about what people are doing with Rails. How does Rails fit into a containerized microservices environment? How are people building services with Rails, or are they? I'm curious about this and I think a lot of the new developers learning Ruby in this changing environment would be as well.
So, I've put together a really brief survey; I'd love to hear more about why people are using Ruby, or why they are not.
Survey: Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?
Based on the responses I get, I'd also like to do a few Google hangouts with people on both sides of the question. It's one thing to go to a conference and hear an advocate for Ruby tell you reasons why it's a good choice. It's perhaps more informative and entertaining to watch a couple knowledgeable people debate its merits drawing from specific experiences working with Ruby or competing technologies.
Ruby's support for rapid development and Rails' emphasis on convention over coniguration both seem well-suited for the world of containers and microservices. At the same time, we've seen a lot of public examples of companies switching away from these to scale their applications and infrastructure. I'm curious what people we haven't heard from are doing. Let's look at some data on that.
EDIT: The formatting for the link to the survey has been improved.