Ruby on Rails, better known as Rails within its community, is something of a dark horse in Web Development these days. While it’s become a show-stopping full-stack development platform, it’s attachment to the little understood and rare Ruby script has made it a rare skills among web developers.
But if you’ve heard of Shopify, Airbnb, or Soundcloud, you may already be familiar with Rail’s impressive ability to more with less. And in an age (and industry) defined by small, tight startups operating on maximum returns on talent, Rails has the wherewithal to make a lot of changes to Toronto’s startup scene.
Not convinced you should work on putting Rails down on your resume? Here are some of the reasons web developers may want to reconsider putting off learning in the Rails environment.
Full Stack skills are in high demand right now
The push towards full-stack development is largely predicated on the diminishing returns of larger IT firms and the impressive momentum that smaller startups have had in recent years. “Full stack web development” is about as buzzy as buzzwords can get, especially these days, but there’s a huge demand for experience in Full Stack, and here’s why:
- Full Stack development, while having its tradeoffs in a software environment, is present in nearly any web development environment due to the integrated nature of web development. Web sites don’t decouple into libraries, function lists and logic gates so easily (though when they do, you’re likely doing something that Rails is still a part of)
- For development firms, Full Stack allows project developers to better design and implement turn-key web development for clients, particularly for smaller firms that need to develop with a smaller staff than a larger IT company.
- On a personal level: Full Stack experience is a far more portable skill to possess, and it suits individuals well towards transitioning to design or project management positions.
- Ruby’s status as an underused scripting language, coupled with Rails’ growing popularity, mean that the demand for Rails is higher in relation to its supply, particularly across the GTA. Adoption, or at the very least familiarity, of Rails will perform well as a skill in the current and near-term job market.
Web development with Rails is very feedback oriented
Rails also holds a unique advantage over other Full-Stack development environments in that many of the processes that comprise Rails development are relatively transparent and accessible. HTML/CSS, Javascript, and SQL are all necessary components of a full-stack web environment, while also being integrated into Rails itself, with Ruby serving mostly as the apparatus code.
Web languages also offer a strong environment for learning and applying Rails in personal or professional as it’s easy to see feedback in your work. Unlike learning all development steps in, say, a Java environment, the relationship between different layers of development are intuitive and can be judged and improved very easily.
Rails has a blooming community in Toronto
Rails’ growing popularity in the city is in large part thanks to a great deal of smaller, more agile startups. Lots of diversity in the industry means there’s lots of resources and opportunities for someone looking to delve into Rails and find support while doing it.
The usual suspects for online communities all have open and thriving Rails communities — networks such as Stack Overflow and GitHub.
For those looking for more physical meetups, Toronto offers a small but healthy community of developers — primarily drawn from the city’s startup industry. Meetups, such as through RailsToronto, or directly through MeetUp.com for active events are both great ways to break into the community and learn a little bit more about what the trends are in your area.
Rails Simplifies workflow in a very demanding industry
All developers have a complex surrounding the complexity of their work: namely that they seem to be happier when their work is complex. Fortunately, while Rails never really achieves the precision and utility of Javascript or PHP frameworks, it’s easy enough to learn that most web developers have few excuses *not* to learn the ins-and-outs of it.
Namely: Rails is almost insultingly easy for a seasoned web developer to pick up the basics and approachable enough that hobbyists or new entries to the industry can find the investment is well worth the long-term benefits. Rails is suited to non-programmers in a very special way, in that many logical operations (such as loops) can be compressed down easily to:
3.times {print “Developers! “}
In a web development environment, developers are often coordinating with marketing, clients, backend developers and sysadmins, meaning that while further simplifying operations might feel a bit insulting, you might see why Rails is taking off with startups faster than other frameworks. With a simplified framework, Rails lets you get your work done faster — especially the tedious drone work. And with an easy learning curve, it’ll remain engaging right through project completion.
Not bad for a language that, ten years ago, most of us had never heard of.