Gumroad to Migrate from Ruby on Rails to TypeScript and React | Hacker News Reader

Gumroad to Migrate from Ruby on Rails to TypeScript and React

twitter.com

7 pointstosh11 comments

His reasoning:

> Ruby on Rails is a form of technical debt

I found most of his arguments poorly worded and require lots of context. Which also signals he is not very good with public communication.

It sounds like the reasonable version of this argument would be "We've been using React with a Rails back end for a while now, and rather than refactor our front end to use Hotwire/Alpine/etc. and be more compatible with the modern Rails paradigm, we'd rather keep our existing front end and move to Next."

Judging from depth of thought in the the actual arguments he's making, I expect that he's deploying to Vercel.

No, his reasoning is what he is planning to do, which feels like the js ecosystem is better suited at honestly, or at least the mobile app.

- iPhone and Android apps with parity to our web app

- Much better UX around tables/filtering/sorting

- Customizable navigation with stellar UX (like without refreshing)

- Super customizable dashboards especially for analytics

- Rendering emails dynamically using components we’ve already designed and built for the web

- Page builder-type UXes (both for marketing pages and product content)

https://xcancel.com/shl/status/1839608989073510809#m

Other than the mobile apps (which is a questionable point) all the other points don't make much sense.

UX doesn't depent on the tech stack. Look at the tech stack by gov.uk for example which is probably one of the more serious UX efforts ever made. They use a bunch of stuff including Rails and Django. I believe until a couple of years ago they were still using jQuery.

To me, the mobile app is the only point that makes sense.

Rails already includes Turbo Native for use cases like this, though: https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/native

Just tried the demo https://turbo-native-demo.glitch.me

it’s cool indeed, but there is something off with the interaction. Can’t really explain it.

Turbo Native is about to be deprecated I think https://native.hotwired.dev

Seeing how they've started having their support team use AI to generate features https://twitter.com/shl/status/1839741937504415934 and their "coding CEO" is using it to cover for their lack of ability to write types in typescript https://twitter.com/shl/status/1839615089592209760 it will be interesting to see where they are in terms of technical debt in 12 months time.

also reading the comments. they didn't even start with rails. It was originally written in Python. Feels like distro hopping. I'd be interesting to see the $$$ value add of moving from Python -> Rails -> TS with React.

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