Well, welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rooks Podcast. I'm one of your co hosts today, Valentino Soul, and I'm joined by Ayush Ayush, do you want to introduce yourself?
Hello? Hello, I've been on the podcast while hopefully frequent listeners who would would know? But yeah, quick and Drawn the author of a book called The Reals and X. I'm on the Bridge Down Core team and I talk a lot of crap about Ruby.
He just released another version of the book, didn't you.
Yeah, it's a minor up bit, just a whole bunch of continuity fixes that a very diligent reader sent me.
The book is so huge, I just imagine a minor update is really like.
A book in its own capacity.
You can say that again, Like that's what That's what makes continuity so unbelievably hard, Like like some of the mistakes that this reader said, you know, like some a piece of code that I'd written that I kind of modify like three chapters later, but I'd forgotten to backboard the changes and staff.
See, this is what I'm waiting AI to do. Right, It's just like all this nonsense work that has to happen. But like nobody really wants.
To do it, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's why don't we have a reader bot and it's just like reads your book for you and it's.
Like, okay, yeah, based on this latest stuff, you know you should update these things.
Right that would that would be very useful. So we.
Were talking before the show kind of like Reel's eight is on the way here. Everybody's at Reel's World and Aush and I are feeling major fomo right now. But we're just watching the stream come through of all these incredible updates that are just getting pushed out and released and nounce today. Some of them we already knew were coming, right, some of them we didn't. Do You want to like maybe mention your top highlights so far?
Yeah, So, I mean all I'm looking at is the Twitter feed really because we don't have any YouTube streams as yet, although the keynote apparently will be up later today, which, honestly, Ruby on Rails Foundation is bloody amazing turn around time have it at on the same day, but yes, a
Rails eight. The highlights are authentication prop shaft, the Solid Trifecta which is solid cash, solid que solid cable thruster, and come all to which the thing that I don't know, maybe I haven't a minority of The thing out of follow that that I find least interesting is authentication because I've always just built my own. I've never been a fan of devisor and thing like that. I just bet my own, So I don't really care that Reels kind of has it because I'll still just use the one I made myself.
Yeah, that's fair. You always prefer your own tools in the end.
Yeah, my ego is too big to let me use anything else.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I feel like I've seen, you know, we've all kind of like been preparing for this. I guess Solid Trifecta that they're calling it now, But yeah, I mean it definitely makes makes me happy to see, you know more and more not have to get set up when you first start up a new app. There's nothing worse than configuring something when you just want to get going.
Yeah. Yeah, completely, And I think just being able to drop the reddest dependency is something that's quite big. And
I'm also for like small indie apps. I think having the three solid libraries along with all the move to its sequel Light is just gonna reduce the amantic complexity pretty significantly because you don't need a database ever anymore either, and you just like you have one sequel Light database for your actual database, you have another one pay cash, you have another one pick you, and it's just like just creating files. It's not that hard, right.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the last leg of this is like wrapping everything in web assembly, so you could just deploy to you know, anywhere, Yeah, which I don't know that will happen in our near term. But you know what, one thing I noticed from the feed, I
was curious what you thought about. It's kind of what's coming in Reel's eight point one, which are like the three bigger features that I feel like have been missing from Reel's lot, which is the action notifier, the search, and house MD, which I thought was funny as a markdown editor.
Yeah, I love that name. So yeah, they announced house MD a while ago, and it's something I've kind of been keeping my eye on. But I have a little bit of scout issue here with tricks because it's a fairly fiddly edited to years. You can't extend it much. They don't maybe recently their stance and it has changed, but they didn't seem particularly involved in trying to improve
it or even like have community involvement. Like I remember I created a pull request a literally added an undocumented event to the read me, and I think that pull request remained open up until two or three years later on. It's literally just literally two lines that read me. So and I know other people who've kind of tried to improve or stuff like that and just not really had
much success working with the maintainers. So yeah, house MD, I'm just tempering my expectations a little bit because, yeah, just I think they've obviously built what works for them, which is not always going to work for everyone else's use case. And I'd like the community to be able to improve it and just make it better. But whether that's going to be viable, we'll find out. But the other thing that you.
Bring up a great point.
That's actually one thing I've been a little bit concerned about with Rails in that, like it's a lot of you know, as things grow and get you know, some solid foundation framework wise, like the need for reducing bloat becomes ever greater, especially as the number of maintainers doesn't really you know, increase too much in proportionality at least, so I didn't worry, like, right, like I've noticed not just with tricks, but other you know, pieces of the framework,
very similar feedback, right, Like it's very long churn process for changes that really don't affect anything.
Yeah, honest.
And so I you know, hopefully you know, with the Rails Foundation and everything like that that is on the radar, make sure that the maintainership at least stays up to date with the progress of the rest of the framework.
Yeah, yeah, you'd hope so. But like I've read the kind of remit of the Rails Foundation and open source isn't really one of those things Like I see a lot on social media, but why can't the Rails Foundation fund the best gem at that GEMA this maintainer And I'm like, that's not They never claimed that they would be doing any of that. Like if you read the initial announcement that like open sauce doesn't feature really in their mission or whatever you want to call it, like
they want to. They'll like they'll focus on like improving documentation, which is something that's happening. Yes, yeah, funding open Sauce is not one of the things they do. And we're right or wrong. It's not something they've ever claim to do, so.
I don't think, yeah, I mean, I don't know that they have to throw funding at it. More just like organizational like, hey, like we have this increase in the code base, and you know, we need maintainers like the
organizational stuff. I feel like that's that's where I was hoping that add to right is that you know, cases like this where you know, we we have like only so many limited contributors that have like you know, approval access to just merge something right, which is good, you know, both good and bad, but it's like definitely adds a bottleneck.
And so I would like to see something where like I don't know, people can vote people into contributorship, right, Like where we can create a pipeline that just like makes this process easier, because like, to be honest, like somebody going through and just like approving a bunch of the documentation stuff like that would be a huge help, you know, And I know that I know that's somebody's probably already like working on that, but like every one of the reels repos like.
Yeah, So I think that's where there's a little bit of uh mismanagement. I think is because so the Rails core team is really good and they have a really defined structure like core committees and the issues team, and with Rails, they are always on it, like I've always got responses to anyprs pretty quickly in rails. But then there's some stuff that's in rails that kind of sits in this gray area which is kind of in rails but not, which is like all the hot wire libraries are.
They're in rails, but they're kind of not because they're owned by Petty seven Signals. Tricks is another one, because they had Tricks is action text is in raels, but Tricks is in like base camps organizations. It's like Petty seven Signals or whatever. It's like, yeah, there are certain things that sit in this weird gray area. We're just kind of in rails but kind of not. And I think that's where all the problems are happening.
Well, you know, I got to hand it to Shopify.
They seem to have like at least solved that issue with Ruby itself right like they had their own fork of Ruby for a while, like handling all of this stuff that they've been upstreaming over the years for like copy on right and things like that, and I feel like, you know, they have had lots of you know, repos that were basically versions of that that they made their way into the official right like realm so as possible, right, Like thirty seven Singles is just another company.
Right, Like yep, I don't think it possible. We'll just Yeah, it is a bit of frustration with I know people who've contributed to hot Wire, especially at Marco. Roth gave a great talk at a few conferences just about obviously all the good stuff in Hotwire, but some of his frustrations as well, and a lot of that was organizational. So we'll just have to see how this stuff evolves.
And it's just my personal frustration is that like some of these things are in rails as defaults electrics and stuff, but they aren't in control of the rail score team. So that just creates a little bit of mismanagement, I think. But we'll see what happens.
Yeah.
The other two things that you mentioned for Rails eight point one are things that I'm very much looking forward tore. Like active record search is something that I think is gonna really simplify matter.
That is, like the funniest thing, right, because like the whole Rails, like you know, Hype started off of a blog, which is like search is like kind of something you add to a blog, right, as like one.
Of your primary features.
Honestly, it's what you had almost any any site that you make with reels. So yeah, I mean it's super I'm super excited about that. I hope it's I mean, if it's anything like all the other reels you know, interfaces, it should be very straightforward. Are you hoping that it aligns with any particular you know, search gem that you've used in the past.
No, not really so. I for my book, I wrote an entire chapter on search, and that's why. Actually I'm quite happy that it's not built into Rails, And I didn't really use a GEM. I just used the full tech search and trigram search features in Postgress and then hand wrote ERL queries. It was a lot of this is academic because once you teach a read up how to do those things and then you could your level
of understanding just goes way up. So I'm not really concerned about whether it aligns at a certain gem or not. The main thing is I just hope it has support for full tech search and trigram search because they are strategies. Is there full tech search and sequel light, Yes, there is.
Oh nice, Yeah, I feel like that's something that you know, once you realize this there, you're like, why do I need other things?
You know, I mean, until you start using it heavily, but.
Expose a text column like to search on, it's like pretty good.
Yeah, Like I think again, for the vast majority of use cases, just your database, a search is probably good enough. Like I can only speak to postcress because I'm not used the full tech search in other databases. But it's actually really good. It's only when you want to start like go going quite advances when you need to reach for something like elastic search. Like for the client I'm working with at the moment is it's kind of like a AI powered search engine for people and companies, kind
of like a directory of people and companies. And we've used elastic search for that because literally the core offering is a search engine, so we need something quite bpy. But that like that was probably one of the very few exceptions when I would go reaching for something like elastic search. Is when your core offering is literally search.
Yeah, I agree with you there.
I mean I feel like, you know, most apps are like business related, like where you'll have a CRM or like some classic uh you know solution that you're just trying to solve with like your custom data or things like that, and that you know, having a just quick full text search or and any deep you know, I imagine what active search will become. It will just be so great, like just just hook it up to a model or you know whatever it may be, like a series of models, like.
I can see it being pretty huge.
Yeah, I think it would really simplify matters. And yeah, I think it's one of those things that's been a bit of a long time coming. But I'm glad it's it's it's it's on its way now. And yeah, Action notifier is another one, but it's gonna be cool because push notifications of just fiddley. That's it's just the nature
of them. It is that they are just fiddley. And if I, if I understanding of what the framework is is correct, then it's it's going to handle sending notifications to web iOS and Android, so you don't need to worry about any of that on your own. Obviously, the web stuff is what kind of interests me the most, because going forward me personally, my focus is going to be completely on PWA's I'm leaving the native stuff behind.
Even that the second edition of my book is not going to have any native stuff, I'm going to remove it all in favor of p w A's. So web push is something that I need to explain how you can do it now in rails, but action notifi would just make it easier.
Yeah, I hope they borrow from Chris Oliver's notice.
Jim, I've used that in the past and it's like very straightforward.
And you know, doable.
Yeah, yeah, it's a It is a very easy to use interface. I did. I did take a lot inspiration from it. Whenever I have built kind of notifications in apps, I'm not reached for that library myself necessarily. Again, I don't really like reaching for dependencies. I prefer building stuff myself because I don't know just wired that way. But it is a very solid library and I kind of look to it for inspiration.
It does it does add to the list of gems that people will have to migrate away from, like yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's it's kind of it's true. It's it's kind of like, uh, just the way rails goes, right, Eventually stuff ends up in the platform and then like because ye yet Carrier Wave and paper clip for number of years and active stories became a thing and then everyone out of my grade. Yeah,
it's just the way it goes. But I think I'm more looking forward to Rael's eight point one than eight really, because yeah, while I was, I think I honestly should put something in a swage or every time I mentioned my book on this on this podcast.
But it's a great one, by the way, check it out dot com, buy it.
But I had a like a second edition planned right for everything new, and that's going to be like a paid upgrade. But looking at everything that's come out, I think I'm not actually wait for Reels eight point one because then I can cover active rack as search and action notifier, which are like key parts of any web application.
And since I'm kind of standardizing around PWA's, it makes sense to wait for action notifier because I don't want to build my own system, which is I know going to be outdated very soon.
Yeah.
On the topic of books, I saw Obi Fernandez posting an update to the rails way now the Rails eight way.
Yeah, the Reels eight way. I saw that.
I'm excited to be honest, I'll probably learn all the new Reels eight features.
Yeah, I mean that, you know that book's going to be solid. It is going to be it's gonna be good. Quite a lot of good stuff coming down the pipeline. What are your feelings on Camal? Have you used it? Do you have any opinions on it?
I'm interesting, comeal, I'm kind of waiting for it to just like mature a little more, you know, all all the like you know, the transitions of traffic as an example, yea, you know, there's a lot of like shifting sands still and just from like I don't personally use it every day, so like, just from what I see, it seems to be like a lot of the infrastructure is changing around as they start to learn more and more the edge
cases and configuration options and things like that. So I do have a couple of, like, you know, Doku apps that I would like to migrate eventually, but I'll probably wait till next year, to be honest, just to like let real Z eight like settle and have everything more firmed.
Up fair enough, that's a good way to go about it. I've kind of just been watching from afar as well with Comal, largely because it's DOCA based and I I don't understand DOCCA well enough to not be afraid of it as yet. So so yeah, it's probably just one of those things I need to look at at some point. But like, my one frustration with Docker and we even Camal in general is that it adds this additional moving
part of a Docker registry. Like if all I've got is a very simple indie app that runs on one box, I don't want to deal with Excuse me, I don't want to have to deal with the additional complexity of pushing to a Docker registry and then my server pulling from there. Like it's just me working on it, just by myself, running it on one box, Like why can't I build the Docker container locally and then just push that up to the server.
Yeah, you make a great point, like why have docer if you have one server?
Yeah, that's a great point as well.
Yeah, I mean I feel like it it's definitely like a foundational choice, right, Like I think of it as like legos, right, like where you have like you know, if you just build legos on a table, like yeah, that's that's fine. But you have like a sheet where you're like sticking the legos to to build your you know thing, it's a lot easier to build it as
it doesn't move around. And I don't know, I feel like it's kind of like that as it's like laying the foundation for you to add more stuff that you know eventually you're gonna need to add it.
Y you know, I feel like the probability.
Of not extending what you have if you actually make something that you know you use every day, it's like very low chance that you're not just going to add something new to your stack. And so I like that it's there, right, Like it just it is like the modular framework for that aspect of things. But at the same time, ye know, docer development is like it definitely slows you down, Like there are educases that you can't
even imagine from using platforms, right. Cross platform use of like a single interface is like it never works out like smoothly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's at some point I want to do it just a little deep dive personally into what it takes to just deploy a reels app to a Linux box with something like Caddy in front of it, and just see what if there's a way to kind of simplify that without Docker. Yeah, because I just don't need docer. But the one big advantage of something like Camal, I think, is if you want to sell like a one style product that like a web app that you
just do a one off sale for. I've been thinking about this for like months before Once was even a thing. This kind of idea was in my mind. There is absolutely no sane way to distribute a web app without DOCA. It's just this rabbit bol of complexity. Like it just gets you telling a customer to kind of do too much. Like if I was selling a Rails app like that that was a one off sale and without docrizing it, I would basically be selling only to other people that
new Rails. No one else would go anywhere near that.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean distribution of an application that's bumbled up, like if you're not like creating an executable or something.
Right, Yeah, like how do you do that?
I do?
Like we had Andy on.
About the Glimmer project, right, and I did, Like I like that kind of idea of like literally packaging something up as like a binary and like that's how.
You I mean, because that's a great way to shift things, right.
It's like okay that those cross platform like distribution is like already established and pretty straightforward, and Glimmer is one of those frameworks that makes that process easy, right, and like the whole like uh you know, Dragon Ruby Toolkit for game distribution. I feel like all that's really missing and I know that like Andy was mentioning that he's trying to work on that uh you know, front end
aspect of the Glimmer project. But yeah, that's what's missing is kind of like the web site of that distribution where we have like the browsers now, which I think the you know, I thought the goal of the browser was to be that distribution platform. But it's like the competition between the browsers has just like stifled progress like so much.
Like it's kind of remarkable. People are just like okay.
With that, like yeah, we're just gonna like, you know, no no problem, Like all these browsers are competing, so like we're just not gonna have a distribution platform for you know, web. Yeah, it's crazy to me like, yeah, I don't know. I was hopeful with like Travel Ruby or something like that that we'd see maybe something a little a little more progress, but uh, I guess it's hard to sell that, right, Like you, if your end users are all distributed, how do you how do you deliver the best thing?
Right? Yeah, it's it's no simple problem. If it was simpler, it would have probably been solved by now.
Although that does bring me to another announcement with the Turbo what is.
It hot Wire Native Native?
Yeah, yeah, because we did. We had a I'm blanking on his name now, yeah, Joe. We had Joe on before a few.
Times, I think, Okay, they were he was talking about Turbo Native and the progress that he was making there and apparently has been collaborating right with thirty seven Signals. Yeah, it happened, which is really exciting because I know the last time I was messing around with that, it's like pretty decent. I mean, they're still like he's still got to write some objective CY or not objective C but like Swift yeah, and Android like it's small and amunt of code.
Now, yeah, it's happy, but I think it's it's the right approach that you still have you have an excert project on andro Studio project, your code based still separate. I think that's a very good approach and I I spoke at length about this at a couple of conferences last year, as if you look up building Turbo native apps with my name, you'll find my talk at Friendly RB last year about this, and I completely agree is
the right approach, and honestly like what they've done. It just seems more like a rebrand, and I think it is a rebrand for the better because having Turbo Native and Strata is separate things, it was just a little bit confusing, and they've just unified those under this hot Wire Native umbrella now, so it's one thing, like both the native kind of worlds are just one thing, and the documentation is a lot better, which I believe Joe
helped out with. And the other thing was I think Joe also built a library called Turbo Navigator, which so a lot of like the native navigation stuff on iOS you have to build on your own, but an Android it's kind of part of the platform. So Joe the slave recal Turbo Navigator, which kind of brought the same ergonomics to iOS as well, which now I believe is part of hot Wire Native that does simplify life on
iOS as well. So yeah, it's all all this very good stuff stuff I'll personally remain quite blissfully ignorant of though, because I've just had I've had enough of Native in my life. I don't want anymore.
Yeah, and it's it's gonna be hard to stay away from it with all this Apple Intelligence stuff now even increasing the hype, and I imagine you know there's a Google version of that out there too, you know, drawing more and more people to their mobile devices.
Yeah, quite possibly, But yeah, I don't know. I think PW is I hope just it just it just needs better marketing, I think. And it also needs, uh like the the big tech companies to kind of come on board with it, which is the harder part. Like what I would really like to see is the ability to put a button on a website that says installed to home screen, and you tap it and it just does it.
Because like now, the best solution you can have is you can have that button and you can have instructions on what to do, which is usually a click a share button in an at home screen or whatever. You can't automate that. There is no API to do that. But you can see why Apple and Android don't want to do that.
Why we don't have to get into it.
Something to do with green paper.
I will say, Like, just taking a step back to the conference again, Reels World, I mean it is packed. You see the audience and a lot of these photos and it's kind of exciting to see, you know, people all over the world coming together making this stuff happen, the ship and stuff. It's you know, there's no way reels can be dead with that crowd.
Oh yeah, real reels is just not the fashionable thing anymore. It's yeah, as I kind of I've been asked before, like because I've only come to raels twenty hours mobile development before that, Like I've been asked like I did I find reels to be some kind of like niche framework or something that was in the past when I got into it, And I'm like, no, I never thought that for one second. I always thought of it as a mature, solid piece of technology that just wasn't fashionable anymore.
And I'm fairly cynical enough to not give a shit about the fashion aspect of teck like, I mean, you have Angula, you have React. These things just go and come in waves, and I'm like, just let me write HTML and CSS like and groovy on the back end. That's that generates HTML and CSS and I'm happy really about anything else.
Yeah, I mean it's hard to you know, it's hard to sell somebody focused on front end like a framework that they don't understand. Uh. And it's you know, likewise the same way, right, Like I know a lot of friend of people that are like, you know, very happy with uh you know next JS or or something like that, and they're very efficient in it and it makes them productive. Like, uh, you know, why would they switch to rails and maybe until they need like file upload or something.
Uh No, I don't know.
There are like some things in reels that do just like they would just work and they make things very easy. And so I feel like the more we can expose like what those things are and how easy it is, the more people will adapt to it.
For sure.
Yeah, completely, I mean, yeah, nothing to add about.
It's something I'm curious because you're kind of like all over the place in the stack. What's something from reels that you use that like you know, you've used another frameworks that is just like unparalleled to using REELS.
With I don't know, it's hard to pick just one because Rails is the only backend stack that I've ever used. It's hard to kind of compare it to something else.
But like every thing you kind of need to build a modern web app, it's kind of standardized in some way or the other, like like when you look at other stacks of some more anecdotal from when I go speaking to two JavaScript people, it's uh that you kind of need to pull in stuff plugins and things for basic things like file upload, you need to go look
for a plugin for that. Authentication you gotta look go look for a plugin for that, uh you uh yeah, you basically need to build a stack that Rails gives you already out of the box. Like if you're building a web application, all the pieces you need are already in Rails, which obviously makes it a bit of a behemoth, and when you need something very simple, it's not the right deal for the job for that reason. But for most modern web applications, you do need all that and Rail just gives it to you.
Yeah, I agree there, I mean, it's it's a little tricky because like, uh, I'm still trying to find the right like front end magic right, like if I want to, like I don't know, add some like ux flourishes using some you know MPM package or something. There's like kind of eight different ways to integrate.
That into the reels.
And so I mean I know that, like you know, there there is some hope in the in the pipeline coming, but it's still very much divided on how the best approach is, Like the standard is kind of still not firmed yet. I don't know what what's your impression there on like you know, integrating front end components that are external to the ecosystem.
It's a yeah, bitter kind of worms Like, so I quite like view component the library. I know there was some chatter to merge that with rails. The last time I met Joel Hawksley, who's the leader of the project, which was twenty twenty two summer twenty two at Brighton Ruby, he still had ambitions of merging it into RAILS. So that is one dependent Like I don't reach for a lot of dependencies naturally for every app, a view component
is one of them. And I quite like that approach because it again focuses on generating generating HTML on the server, which is just like just the construct with which he generated is like componentized and you send that down to the browser and then if you need like JavaScript components, I just used custom elements like they are absolutely amazing. It blows my mind that they're not more widely used
than they are. They are just so so useful. Like last year when I was helping out with the with the Rails World conference website as mentoring the junior developer who built it, and we needed to put like a back to top button on the on the web page, which kind of which appears only when you've kind of
scrolled down twice the height of the viewpot. And this was a jackal app, So we didn't have a JavaScript pipeline and I don't hate myself, which is why they want to set one up, So we were limited to basically vanilla javascripts are like my first instinct would have been to reach for stimulus controller, but I didn't really want to pull in javscript dependencies because we were writing
vanilla JavaScript without any kind of bundling or anything. So I just showed her how to use a custom element and it was just so elegant and so simple, and it's just such a great solution to so many problems.
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned Joel Drapper.
Joel Hawksley, Joel Rappers. Joel Drapper is the Flex guy.
Right, flex guy. It made me think of the Flex guy.
Okay. Yeah, the book.
The v compone stuff that Joel Hawksley is working on is really impressive. I mean, there's a there's always so much like coming out there too, and and it it makes me think of Joel Drapper, who is funny. They're both Joel working on similar with the Flex repo. I mean I just saw I've been.
Following the f L E c K S okay.
Which basically makes like a bi directional you know, data coupled view component basically with Flex that you can like serve asynchronously over web sockets to.
Like get updates.
Really cool stuff where you get kind of like the data coupled back end to the front end in a single component.
It's like really neat and to be honest, like the whole Phoenix Live you like, which has been out a long.
Time, right, Yeah, yeah, you.
Know I've been waiting for something like that in reels for the longest time because we're close with you know, hot wire. I know that was like kind of supposed to be the driver for that. It is still a little bit clunky, I think with all the IDs and trying to manage what streams to what and what what file holds, what update right and what gets executed where it's still a little bit hard to follow.
H Yeah, it is. I'm not used live, but live y is obviously is a bit for one thing, and right, stuff like action cable and the broadcast system within hot wires just like a feature of a bigger thing. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's why it just felt it feels a bit bolleted on because because it is it is.
Yeah, that's funny, but.
You know, I mean I'm hopeful, like it's a it's funny that like you know, view component as an example, hasn't like kind of made its way into the reel's ecosystem with how with its longevity? Right? Uh? Yeah, obviously there's some trepidation for a reason, right, Like it does introduce kind of some you know DSL that you have to be familiar with, and it's not quite as real as.
It it could be.
It's I guess it's more of the Ruby way than the Reels way, which is kind of funny.
Yeah, that's that's very true. I don't know exactly what the objections to getting it into reals were, but yeah, that is probably likely. One of them is that it just feels a bit different. I couldn't articulate exactly why.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's funny because like I remember, you know, I haven't done view components in a while, but the last I did it was like great encapsulation. You know, you could test the changes that get made to your component. It's encapsulated perfectly, and you know, when you mutate the props, the actual HTML that gets rendered gets changed in specific ways and.
You don't have to worry about it. It's all Ruby. I mean, there's a lot of appealing qualities of it.
Yeah, I feel like it becomes the same like front end issue of Okay, well how do you extend it? How do you like add these custom components, our custom features, and then you end up hied into the DSL of the framework.
And because it's its own framework.
Yeah, like Flex kind of has the same issues there too, Right, is that if he wanted to create your own you know, element or something like that or component. It's not exactly straightforward because you have to follow however, the framework has it set up, and you know, all of these things go against what most front end people do. So I feel like the you know, the the rails and Ruby like developer ecosystem that's full stack like slowly gets narrowed in as you get to like the front end.
Like it's very like back. It's been back and heavy for a long time.
Yeah, it's been shared like it's it's getting wider, right, but like I feel like even still that like the audience narrows quite a bit when you get like closer to the front and side of things.
Yeah, it does that. I don't know, maybe I'm a bit old school. I don't really see a massive reason for there to be this demarcation between front end and back end. Like sure, you might be better at one compared to the other, but I think if you're a web developer, you should just be able to do everything.
Well, I think it comes in it.
I'm torn, right, Like I've been at a small organization where having full stack people is you know, very beneficial, and like when you have fewer people, it's just easier to move faster if everybody kind of touches on all
the same things, but in a bigger organization too. It's like kind of nice having people that just devote themselves to like making sure front end components work smoothly, right, or like once you get a design system in play, making sure that all the components are uniform across all of your applications and making sure that like things is like it's a smooth experience for the user.
You know.
UX is like on its own is probably its own you know field, and so like if you have a team devoted to just UX, like the number of back end things they'd have to work on is going to get smaller and smaller as they start to you know, work on more and more of that system that they're building, to be honest, And.
So it's like it's a double edged sword really because like maybe for like.
Maybe for most people working in rails, right, like you want that full feature set in full stack mentality. Yeah, as a larger entity, it's just like becomes less and less attractive or desire, like your need for it starts to thin out right after a certain thing. So I don't know, it's the problem is like we need both, Like, I don't know, the desire for specialists is like kind of still important.
Right, Like yeah, yeah it is.
You're still going to need somebody to work specifically on security at some point if you if that's part of your core business, right and or if you have regulatory aspects of your business, you know, you're going to have
these specialists that are in demand no matter what. Uh So, I don't know the it's it's hard because like as a perfect example of like security, right, like active record encryption is like awesome, right, and they had, you know, when they were first releasing that, you know, they had like a third party auditor come in and make sure that you know all of the encryption stuff because like not nobody's worrying on encryption stuff specifically, you know, on
the real core team. I mean they're there are handful of people that have knowledge of it, right yeah, but they're not like working on the new algorithms, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah that's problem there. I'd be worried if they were working on the algorithms.
Right yeah, like what are they sneaking in? Right? Like yeah, just reminds me of that.
Uh And guys Adam Gordon Bell, he has this great podcast, the co reor cursive podcast. Uh, and he had somebody They did this whole like dialogue like re enacting that security incident recently that made it into the compiler kernels from some like you know, Chinese co conspirator supposedly like you know, they don't really know like too much of the details, but just like you know, part of the
I forget was it the GNU compiler. It was some something tangentially related to the assembly aspects of compiling where they were able to get like uh you know, ah, I don't know, some kind of like uh like mutation to the our permutation to the compiling that like made it like inject code like with anything that was compiled with it.
Yeah, and that spread like crazy.
It was just like a very interesting dialogue.
But it actually think of.
This stuff right, like you know what else is just like in there? There's no I mean, you'd be selective of your contributors, but I don't know that that's like a long winded thing about you know, specialists really but like you know, I don't think we should shy away from them. And you know, the more we can keep things modular and accessible, the better that the framework will be.
But yeah, I completely agree with all your points on specialists, and it's absolutely a good thing when you have someone who's gone really deep on like, yeah, one aspect of maybe like front enda, backend or whatever. But I also think that you shouldn't be completely unaware of the other thing.
Like if you're a front end specialist and you're like is at that, it shouldn't mean that you're afraid to create a model, a controller, a database, vibration that kind of like, yeah, sure you may not be as good at it as someone who specializes in the back end, but I think you should be competent enough to be able to do the basics.
Yeah, I don't disagree with that.
I think having the tools and the framework that makes that easier to do the better. Yeah, these generators are great, I mean to be honest, I would like to see some improvements there to the whole generator aspect of things and customization. So I know you already can do, but I don't know, it seems like not straightforward as a first time user on like what you can generate, what's available, like the you know that is definitely discoverability is definitely still a problem within.
The yeah, yeah.
Which the guides are great.
I'm so happy to see all the documentation, you know, getting the tender love and care that it needs.
But you know, it's still like discoverability problem.
Is uh, you know, even on the development side is still an issue.
I don't know, what do you what do you point people to that?
Like, let's say you're talking with somebody on the JavaScript side and you're like trying to convince them, you know, hey, like it's not so hard, Like what do you point them at?
Yeah, it's a good question. Off the top of my head, I wouldn't know what to point them at it. I'd probably look for a blog post, to be honest, I'd probably look for a step by step tutorial and how do you like create a model or whatever? Because the Rails guys are very good, but they're also kind of aimed at someone who's actually trying to like learn rails, is familiar with with rails, which is fine because you need you need to write for a set of target
audience otherwise nothing's ever going to make any sense. But yeah, if I'm talking to someone who's like more front and he doesn't really know much about rails, and unless they're like keen to really get into Rails. The guides is probably not where I would send them.
That makes it somebody should go create a Ruby toolbox for Rail's tutorials, right, I feel like there's value, so much value there.
I should just buy my book.
Or by go ahead, they still.
Rails are not good dot com going by it now.
Honestly, that book is so oppressively like large and like covers all the topics you could possibly need, Like we should be pumping it out there because like, honestly, if hey, if you have questions about that hot wire framework, like it's in there, in there.
Yeah, if it's not, you can email me right and you can demand, like I demand that you're right about this feature. I mean, I'll pay attention. I may not pay any attention to your demand, but you can write me if you want.
That's great. So what else do you feel like you're missing out on in real's world?
I know? For me, I think conferences are just about networking. I don't necessarily miss any of the talks because I just catch up on YouTube afterwards. Most conferences these days put the dogs on YouTube. The main reason I kind of wish I was there the networking aspect, especially as
a freelancer, it's it's kind of key. But yeah, again, as a freelancer getting over to Toronto and paying for I think it was like five hundred dollars six hundred dollar ticket on top of hotels and flights, it's just like and then the opportunity cost of lost income because if I go will be probably a week, and that's one week of income lost. You're looking at when you combine everything, you're probably looking at closer to like five thousand dollars, And it's like, do I really want to
spend that much? Like I'm going, I'm going to New Zealand for six weeks at the end of the year, and I'm probably spending about six pounds for that entire trip for six weeks.
Yeah.
You know you're in the European region too, which has so many great conferences. Yeah, yeah, I understand totally. I actually have fomo myself about all those great conferences that are there that just probably won't ever get to.
Yeah, they're really gonna. I think that Devo shout out to friendly that RB where I spoke last year, I couldn't it was last week I couldn't go this year just because the dates didn't work for me. I had another trip planned, but if anyone's looking to get over to Europe, that's probably one. And I'm speaking at Hagis
Ruby next month as well. That's the first year of that conference in Edinburgh, so that should be fun because Olie, who we had on this show, I think two or three weeks ago, he's a speaker as well, So I'm sure that'll be a good conference as well. Yeah, is beautiful too, lovely city. I love going there.
Well, we've talked about so much here.
Yeah, I think we've covered everything that we know of at this point.
That we're gonna have to have some follow up talks with you know, some of the co creators here.
Yeah, I think we should have. I think we really need to get Rosa on to talk about solid Q. Yeah, and I think we should get someone I don't. I think it's Donald who handles a lot of the Camal stuff. Would love to get him on and chat comal with him.
Yeah.
Yeah, I got a couple of so.
Many great insights there.
You know what's coming out, you know, it's hard to use it all, you know right away, So because yeah, kind of how it all works and how you can because I want to.
Know, Yeah, exactly, Like sometimes the best way is to have like a couple of couple of idiots, like I was just ask stupid questions, uh, to the expert, and that's how like other people can also learn. So definitely, yeah, we're getting them on all right.
Well, Uh, is there anything else you wanted to talk about today?
Is no? I think that covers it awesome.
Uh, well let's moving to our picks.
All right, So yeah, I'll go first, So I'll do a musical pick and a movie pic. I think I don't have actually do a tech pic as well, so I have a musical pick. I went to see a band called Big Big Train on Tuesday, and they're like an English progressive rock band. To me, they kind of just embody England as a country. They're like the most English band you could ever have. They sing about like
the history and the countryside and uh. They had one album which is like about a little bit about space exploration that a song called Apollo and Voyager and stuff. So they're like very and their latest album has two songs about cricket. So they're about as English a band as you could possibly get. So I absolutely love them. They're a great live band as well. I believe they're over in America next year for a few shows in the spring, so if live music is your thing, i'd
recommend checking them out. I recently saw a movie called See How They Run, which I just loved it. It's a twist on the Who Done It genre, so it's kind of the events take place around a performance of the play The Mousetrap, which itself is a good old fashioned who Done It? Written by Gartha Christie, which has been running here in London for something like seventy or
eighty years or something silly like that. So the events of this movie take place around that performance, and it is just such a self aware and self deprecating movie, Like how Deadpool is self aware for superhero movies and kind of makes fun of itself. I think See How They Run is equally self aware to the hood on a genre and equally makes fun of itself. And I just love movies that I like that. It's like, we know we're full of shit, and we're not going to
make any pretense that we're not full of shit. It's some brilliant, brilliantly written So yeah, that's my movie pick, and yesterday I was just looking for some applications that would help me screen record and webcam record at the same time to do like a screen cast or something if I just want to send a demo of something I'm doing to a friend. I couldn't find something that was like cheap just that literally just did this one thing, which is record my screen and the webcam and give
me a video file at the end. But then I found this app called clean shot X or clean shot ten. I don't know which one, but a cleanshot dot com. I haven't bought it yet, but it looks exactly like what I'm after. So if you if you're looking to record screen casts, clean shot is probably a good way to go if you're in a mact right, that's my picks.
Awesome, Yeah, I'll have to check these out. So I have just a couple of picks. Here.
The Ruby AI Happy Hours happening again in New York City. This time they're doing a demo night, so I'm excited to go to that, actually giving a demo of a project I started called podcast Buddy, which I hope to have on the show soon. But a little AI companion that can join and answer questions, drives the whole thing and summarizes events and things.
So I'm pretty excited about demoing that.
And I was hoping to get a fully offline version of it working. But the you know, the talk back aspect of it is like very much just like a speak command at this point to s x iMac. Otherwise it's like servers involved, and uh, you know, it's way too many dependencies to get the Texas speech working just right.
Simple is good. I like, I like simple yep.
So uh check it out podcast buddy. You can run it just in the command line and it'll like transcribe your conversation.
I use it for meetings too.
It's great fully offline transcription hirt CPP uh.
And uh. Next to that, I.
Was revisiting something, uh, one of our projects at Proximity called simple Kick. It's a job orchestration for Sidekick, and it's it's fantastic. It gives you like ways to run jobs in parallel and orchestrate many things at once and get callbacks when things are complete or if there's failures.
Uh.
It's super useful and I would definitely recommend checking that out as well.
What's it called again?
Simple Kick? So simple and then k i.
Q okay, nice uh cool, and we build.
It around top of Sidekick itself and it does require Sidekick Pro but.
Okay, yeah, I'm just looking at the read me now because yea, I was going to say that my client, we pay for Sidekick Enterprise, and we've got quite a lot of complex stuff around batching and callbacks and stuff like that. So I'll check this out. Maybe it can make life easier in some way or the other.
Oh yeah, I mean I have a few things working with this, and it just it does makes the whole process just like so streamlined, nice, easy, a reason about. I hope everybody out there is enjoying Rails World feed as much as we are, and hopefully we can get some of these, you know, some of these speakers lined up here and dig in some more on the details coming soon.
Yeah, absolutely be great to get them on the show and pick their brains.
Yeah all right, Well until next time, folks, Valentino out.
Yes, take care everyone,