Hacker News Reader

Comment by davzie | Hacker News Reader

ffs, there goes my next few weeks! Thanks for the info ;)

Start here: https://www.railstutorial.org/book

You'll fly through it.

A word of warning to other people out there: in my experience, this tutorial is best suited to people who are already familiar with at least two of:

1. Web development

2. Ruby/Ruby on Rails

3. Test Driven Develepment

If you're new to programming, start with something else. Trying to learn all three of these at the same time is not a recipe for success. Source: personal experience watching 100% of former mentees fail to make any progress with this tutorial.

I found that skimming the Test Driven Development sections helped cut down the amount of material I needed to get through. Already knowing web development is a good prerequisite as well, and Michael Hartl's Learn Enough series should be able to fill in some of the gaps. Rails didn't make a lot of sense to me until I learned some Ruby, HTML, CSS, and enough Javascript & jquery to manipulate the DOM and make ajax calls.

Rails is not really for new learners in my opinion, since the famous Rails magic can obscure what's happening under the hood, and the framework itself has grown and evolved over the years. Nodejs is better for new devs in my opinion, but Rails really shines once you have the basics and a couple of small apps under your belt.

Appreciate it, thanks! Been web-devvin' for 12 years now so I hope it seems understandable otherwise I seriously should just change career :D

Don’t get too excited, with the right packages I could do the same thing in a day in React. Maybe less. And it would have optimistic UI, real-time updates and a static page distributed through a CDN.

I'm sorry that sounds like a load of BS. I've worked with Django 8 years and React since 2014. Nobody can replicate what django does using a client side view library like React. At least not without downloading half the internet via NPM or Yarn. I suppose your talking about React-Router, Redux, etc... etc... and pulling it all together via some Node/Express single page app?

I'll take django for simplicity any day and run React from it's templates.

React is simple.

First I'd start with creating the database in Postgres. Create tables to hold data and any views needed to represent joined tables for convenience. Once that's settled, the express server comes next to create a CRUD API to work with the data and handle user authentication and authorization. This is dead simple and once it works there's little you need to touch. The database handles any data dependent business logic.

By this point you can make API calls and use the application through any REST client.

So now I just need to create a React client to consume the API and give a great user experience. Don't need Redux. Grab React-Router and a couple packages for UI components and you'll be up and running with the MVP in no time. Checkmate.

> Create tables to hold data and any views needed to represent joined tables for convenience. Once that's settled, the express server comes next to create a CRUD API to work with the data and handle user authentication and authorization.

Not sure how you're beating Rails or Django at this, unless you're a 10X developer going against a normal one. For that matter, I'm willing to bet an experienced Drupal developer using drush would be faster setting things up.

I don't think being able to write some simple SQL makes you a 10x developer. I think it's normal. The way I prefer to see it is relying on ORMs makes you a weak developer.

This is about how fast someone experienced in Rails/Django/Drupal/Laravel could get a basic CRUD app up and running vs. a JS framework.

If you're familiar with setting up a basic express app, and kind of know how you like to do things, can prob set up another one pretty quickly. None of the ORM's prob as mature on node (last i checked) but still not a huge amount of friction if you already know one.

Node will prob take longer if you're taking time to try out [new hotness lib of the day], though.

This could be a cool challenge. Someone volunteer to do equivalent MVPs in ROR and React. Two separate twitch streams side by side to see how the MVP is created in both these technologies. I think it could be a fun and informational/educational event. Any volunteers?

I'd like to see it. A throwdown between two different full stack developers of similar experience in their representative frameworks. Give them both an application to create and its requirements, and a prize money to whoever makes the best application within a set amount of time.

I dunno if you could. We use React Native and Node/Express in house. It isn't nearly as productive as Rails

Reply on news.ycombinator.com