2022Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results

Like many people, I spent a long time debating what would be the best way to get into a career in software development. I chose a bootcamp for the structured setting and accelerated timeline, especially since I would be leaving my job to transition careers. I went to a program that had an emphasis on pair programming as well as a “hands on keyboard” approach. The most valuable aspect of my bootcamp was that on completion I was matched with a company as an intern. I started a 5 week internship at Planet Argon shortly after completing my program and it was one of the best learning experiences of my life. Having the opportunity to work on real world projects with an amazing team of supportive people allowed me to solidify what I’d learned in my 20 week intensive program.

I’m glad to see an increase in the number of respondents who attended a bootcamp, and I think this will continue to rise as more people share their experiences. I think bootcamps are a great way to dive into development and get experience with the “learn how to learn” model that equips students with the skills they need to self teach and grow their skills and knowledge effectively on their own. Having been through the bootcamp experience I would definitely do it again. No matter which route you choose, I think the best way to learn is to just get started - build projects, write code, keep challenging yourself, and the rest will fall into place as you go.

In early 2020, allowing remote work was a substantial differentiator for employers. A little more than two years later, it's become the way nearly all of us work.

This survey has validated something I’ve only been able to speculate as an engineer, and that’s that companies are considerably behind in their rails upgrades- largely due to the difficulty in major version jumps. It’s clear that incompatible dependencies, unreliable tests, and a lack of time and strategy are a large part of this issue. For example, when it comes to dual-booting, we’ve seen clients use this technique, but not to its highest potential. We believe everybody should embrace dual-booting as a best practice to upgrade and stay up to date.

The rise of asdf shows the increasing prevalence of working in multiple languages on a regular basis. Developers don’t want to be a version manager manager, and having one tool to consistently manage your environment across all your applications and languages is a nicer experience. For those who primarily work in Ruby, the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well” still applies. RVM is a mature tool that works well, but features like gemsets are no longer necessary in the modern Ruby ecosystem, and standard interfaces like .ruby-version files make it easy to move between version managers and find the one that works best for you.

Over the past four years, the share of survey respondents building microservices has (very) slightly declined, but the most interesting shift here is the movement from hybrid applications to monoliths. Teams seem to be deciding that hybrid environments offer a poor compromise between the respective benefits of monoliths or microservices. Years later, Rails continues to be a strong choice for building monoliths.

2021 was a defining year for The Ruby on Rails Podcast. We went independent, brought on Mirror Placement as a partner, added three co-hosts (Jemma, Brian and Nick) and of course, hired our wonderful editor, Paul Bahr. Even better, cross over episodes with other shows and panel recordings were the perfect reminder that community content was a collaboration. I continue to be grateful for every listener we have.

Folks are opinionated about their tech stacks, and there's been lots of rumbling about Stimulus and Hotwire. So! It's interesting that React is far and away the favorite front-end ecosystem to pair with Ruby on Rails projects. It's a bit of an extrapolation, but the heavy usage of Jest and Yarn points in that direction.

I’m very happy to see debugging tools have been added to the community survey. As the Ruby community starts focusing on tooling more, it’s important to see what’s inside developers’ tool belts.

I’m also excited to see Ruby Debug already has 10% of the votes just months after its 1.0 release. Any great developer tool relies on many factors to succeed, including feature completeness, stability, education materials, documentation, …etc. So there is still a large room for improvement for Ruby Debug to gain more mindshare.

As a major contributor to the project, I’m confident that it will continue to enhance Ruby developer productivity in more ways. So I hope we can see it continue to gain popularity in the future surveys.

The team and I are excited to see Sentry rising to the top of the leaderboard in error reporting. At Sentry's core, we care about every developer and openness. We always aim to listen to users and develop things in public. Together with domain experts, we try to provide an SDK and product that is easy to use and provides immediate value out of the box. Looking at our Ruby SDK alone, after all these years and thousands of commits from nearly 100 different contributors, it is beyond rewarding to see this feedback from Ruby developers!

That being said, this is OUR success, for Sentry and the OS Ruby community together. Please stay connected with us on Github, we are grateful for any input/feedback.

As one of the maintainers of newrelic_rpm , the gem that connects apps to New Relic, I'm thrilled to see so many respondents trusting our company to monitor their applications.

New Relic made one of its first big marketing announcements at RailsConf in 2008. ("rpm" in the gem's name stands for "rails performance monitoring"!) We're committed to supporting the Ruby community and would love any feedback to make our product stronger on our open source GitHub repo.

I'm surprised to not see OpenTelemetry for Ruby on this list, a newer open source effort to make the way we collect performance data platform agnostic. Many performance monitoring companies believe this will be the future of telemetry data collection. The Ruby project only has stable tracing, but may have metrics and logging available the next time this survey rolls around.

Wow y’all! It fills me with pride to see how much people depend on puma and use it everyday. While it’s a mere brick at the bottom of many apps, the maintainers and community are the heroes, keeping it running happily and smoothly all these years.

While I don't deny there is likely an inherent bias within the community of those who participated in the survey, seeing that 94% recommend that new developers learn and build Rails apps vs other frameworks is really encouraging. I can't help but attribute this to a healthy (and stable) third-party library community, a lot of valuable educational material, and ability for junior developers to be able to quickly learn how to contribute.