Forest Fires and Life After Rails
I found myself speaking to another developer tonight, and we were discussing software development methodologies. Agile, scrum, kanban, and more were all mentioned. I have always thought of these things as ‘frameworks for management’, much akin to the Ruby on Rails’s and Node.js’s of the world.
After thinking about this, I couldn’t help but go back and read what I cannot describe as anything but a classic blog entry from Joel on Software (but this particular entry was written by Benji Smith):
Well, that is a strong title if there ever was one. This was written nearly a decade ago, right around the birth of Ruby on Rails. If you have not read it, do yourself a favour and go enjoy it. It is a laugh-out-loud piece, and completely on point.
But I see a pattern here. The build-up of abstractions, convention, or sheer amount of ‘magic’ can bring the demise of a framework. It snowballs until new developers see it as insane, things are scrapped, legacy systems maintained, and newer ones developed. After we left Java’s mess of abstractions, we have entered a realm of Rails where monolithic apps are the norm, modularity doesn’t happen, and we replicate most of our code on the clientside in another MVC framework in many large projects as a norm.
Maybe it’s time for life after Rails. The forest has burnt before, and it still has passed the test of time and stands magnificent.
If this pissed you off, you probably care enough about something interesting that we should chat on Twitter sometime.
