joemasilotti

Oh hey, that's me! Thanks for the shout out, Brad.

I'm writing up my thoughts on the Strada launch right now. It will hit my newsletter, blog, and RSS feed tomorrow morning.

tl;dr - Strada alone doesn’t unlock new features for Turbo Native apps. Everything you can do with the framework you could already do before. Albeit with much, much more code. Strada provides structure and organization to the tangled mess that is the JavaScript bridge.

Yes, I think journaling has improved my life.

What originally started as blog/newsletter fuel has become a way to offload thoughts. As I work through a new sense of identity being a father, it has helped lighten my mindset. By getting the bad/sad/unfortunate things "on paper" I feel like I am more equipped to take on the work day.

My technique is as simple as possible. I open a new Notion doc, start a 10 minute timer, and write until I hear the ding. If I could disable the backspace/delete key I would. The goal is just to write with no priority given to quality.

> Ruby on Rails is in jeopardy of being added to this list. It has fallen out of favor, and it is tough to find developers for it. What once made it unique is now available in other languages.

I beg to differ. There are 1000+ Rails developers actively looking for work on railsdevs.com

I write for 10 minutes every day. No word limit/count to hit. Just 10 minutes. It’s a surprisingly effective way to “flush” my head and get on with my life.

It’s become part journal, part newsletter fuel, and part self documentation. I have no specific goal when my fingers hit the keyboard other than writing for 10 minutes.

And it’s glorious to see where my thoughts take me. Sometimes I get so wrapped up I come out on the other side, an hour later and 1500 words lighter. Other times I struggle to even make a coherent sentence.

Removing the need to be polished and perfect, I free myself to write as a stream of conscious. If I could disable my backspace key I would. Pops in my head = write it down. A surprisingly freeing exercise that I look forward to each morning.

And if you’re curious, https://masilotti.com/articles - you can see how I go from “serious” stuff to more fun, and then swing back the pendulum a few times. Enjoy!

Ayush does a great job diving into both iOS and Android apps in this book. It's also a great resource for Hotwire in general. I learned a ton and agree with 95% of the Turbo Native content he wrote.

Turbo Native in its current form requires a fair amount of iOS knowledge (and code!) to get working. I'm trying to fill that gap with my blog, workshops, and live streaming sessions. [1]

But it's no excuse for what this library could be if we invest more time into it. In an ideal world the library handles 90% of the boilerplate required to make an iOS app work. I'm talking authentication, pushing/presenting controllers, sensible defaults for Path Configuration, etc. All the stuff that I have to add to every single Turbo Native app I work with. (12+ since I last counted.)

Then devs can focus on differentiation and exciting features like push notifications, native integrations, fancy animations... while the core of the logic remains on the Rails app.

I'm hoping that getting more maintainers (like me!) on the repo will help kickstart this. And I'm excited to see more interest on both HN and Twitter in the framework.

[1] https://masilotti.com

Strada is an unreleased part of Hotwire that's been delayed a few times. But you can still build great hybrid apps without it. The library really only cleans up some code and removes boilerplate around the integration.

One of the best things about Turbo Native is that it is built ON TOP of UIKit. So you get those native navigation animations, including swipe-back, for free.

Native SDKs.

Also, most folks refuse or don't know how to add a "web app" to their Home Screen. Launching in the App Store gives you visibility in both discovery and every day browsing.

Even though the maintainers have pretty much said to use anything else!

I'm guilty myself. I know how Devise works, including all of its quirks, so I refuse to learn something new. I don't think Rails will ever have a built-in authentication solution. But I would love to see more official support for something a bit "lighter" than Devise. And that works out of the box with Turbo.

Thanks! It's fun to see how folks are taking advantage of specific native features.

And the Hotwire stack on web is pretty darn powerful. Being able to make live updates and add interaction with minimal JavaScript? And I can keep writing more Ruby? Count me in.

As long as your website is running Turbo 7, the JavaScript library, then you can interact with Turbo Native. You aren't limited to Ruby on Rails.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo

As long as your website is running Turbo 7, the JavaScript library, then you can interact with Turbo Native. You aren't limited to Ruby on Rails.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo

That's awesome to hear you were able to get something working.

And yes, 100% with you on this one. It's a very non-Rails like experience going to Turbo Native. You have to configure everything pretty much on your own and are left to figure it out by yourself for new things.

One of my goals is to fix this in the near future!

That's a great comparison. The code itself is powerful but it is still hard to use because it lacks documentation.

That said, it is definitely stable enough to leave beta. Basecamp and HEY have been running it for years in production.

It's not official, but I have a series of blog posts on going from zero to App Store. [1] You are still required to write a fair amount of native boilerplate code to get an app working. The official Demo app [2] can get you pretty far but doesn't cover things like authentication.

I've recently become an official maintainer of the Turbo Native libraries and hope to help clean up all of this over the next few months.

[1] https://masilotti.com/turbo-ios/ [2] https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios/tree/main/Demo

This is an amazing demo! It's rare to see a live demo this polished. And one that uses the app itself to actually do the demo? Even better. Nice work! I'm excited to see where this goes.

I couldn't agree more. And now with the rough edges of Rails 7 + Hotwire ironed out it becomes even more viable for teams to adopt.

Thank you! It was a blast being in LA for such an exciting event. We even went to a Star Wars themed bar for a drink after the first day.

And I couldn't agree more. What' even crazier is that folks don't even _need_ senior developers. They just think they do because they don't have the infrastructure in place to level up folks less experienced.

Until employers realize they have to give a little back to the employee (outside of compensation) we are going to be in a hard spot.

Safari because it syncs my passwords and tabs with my iPhone. And because I do native iOS development with embedded web views - which you can only debug with Safari.

I went solo about 2.5 years ago and Twitter has surprisingly filled that gap for me. I ruthlessly prune the folks I’m following which makes me enjoy the space way more than if I followed a ton of folks. The relationships go so far as to meeting IRL with a bunch of them at a recent conference.

Hey there, I’m the solo-founder of railsdevs! Thanks for sharing my site.

Since I launched in November I’ve placed 10+ Rails developers with gigs. About half for full-time roles with salaries ranging from $100k to $200k.

For context, cold messages on LinkedIn have a 5-20% response rate. Usually on the lower end.

railsdevs is currently sitting at 50%+. If you’re hiring a Rails developer everyone is already half qualified - so matching is much more likely.

I use Turbo Native on iOS to do exactly this.

You render your mobile web view like normal, wire up a JavaScript handler (formerly known as Turbolinks), and push native screens on iOS. It works really well for CRUD and "boring" SAAS apps with little interaction outside of forms. And when you need higher fidelity dropping down to SwiftUI or UIKit is straightforward.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios

To make things even simpler, I built Jumpstart iOS, which takes care of all of the Swift boilerplate. Navigation, authentication, and push notifications all work out of the box after adding a few endpoints to your server.

https://jumpstartrails.com/ios

I'm in charge of Jumpstart iOS! It's a similar template but for Turbo Native-powered iOS apps.

Jumpstart takes care of a _lot_ of the boilerplate code in building a saas. I think it's worth the investment, but I'm involved in the project, so I'm pretty biased.

Appreciate it – thank you!

Ha, I'm with you there. But everyone I spoke to said it resonated so I kept it.

I'm confident that it will continue to be a successful product. Lot's of the paying customers have been around since the beginning and churn is pretty low, especially for a $9/mo service.

It's supported on any platform that works with Open Graph tags, which is most social networks. Twitter was the primary target because I spend most of my time there and that's where my audience is.

Maybe! I just didn't have the appetite. And I know that the folks who bought it do – so let them grow it to what it can be.

Huh, that's a really good point. I never thought about it like that! To farther prove your point, my audience is also entirely on Twitter, so building in public worked really well _for me_.