Rails went through a down period 2014-2020 due to several reasons:
1. React burst on the scene in 2014
2. the hyperscale FANG companies were dominating the architecture meta with microservices, tooling etc, which worked for them at 500+ engineers, but made no sense for smaller companies.
3. there was a growing perception that "Rails doesn't scale" as selection bias kicked in - companies that successfully used rails to grow their companies, then were big enough to justify migrating off to microservices, or whatever.
4. Basecamp got caught up in the DEI battles and got a ton of bad press at the height of it.
5. Ruby was legitimately seen as slow.
The big companies that stuck with Rails (GH, Shopify, Gitlab, etc, etc) did a ton of work to fix Ruby perf, and it shows. Shopify in particular deserves an enormous amount of credit for keeping Ruby and Rails going. Their continued existence proves that Rails does, in fact, scale.
Also the meta - tech-architecture and otherwise - seems to be turning back to DHH's favor, make of that what you will.
The RoR hype started to wane long before React. You're really missing a huge part of our industry:
- While most 2nd or 3rd tier tech companies don't need Google scale infrastructure, SOA in Java/C# and then Go is incredibly prevalent. Many teams never had a reason to even look at RoR and its considerably worse language and runtime.
- Good ideas from RoR were copied by pretty much every ecosystem; again, most people never wanted Ruby in the first place.
you might mean shopify, not spotify. I think spotify is python/go, whereas shopify was started by a rails core contributor and probably has the biggest rails deployment in the world
>which worked for them at 500+ engineers, but made no sense for smaller companies
The number of hi-tech companies that grew from 37signals size to Uber size have also increased due to various reasons: SaaS becoming more and more accepted, WallStreet loves SaaS, and in general just more investment money in the market.
1. React burst on the scene in 2014
2. the hyperscale FANG companies were dominating the architecture meta with microservices, tooling etc, which worked for them at 500+ engineers, but made no sense for smaller companies.
3. there was a growing perception that "Rails doesn't scale" as selection bias kicked in - companies that successfully used rails to grow their companies, then were big enough to justify migrating off to microservices, or whatever.
4. Basecamp got caught up in the DEI battles and got a ton of bad press at the height of it.
5. Ruby was legitimately seen as slow.
The big companies that stuck with Rails (GH, Shopify, Gitlab, etc, etc) did a ton of work to fix Ruby perf, and it shows. Shopify in particular deserves an enormous amount of credit for keeping Ruby and Rails going. Their continued existence proves that Rails does, in fact, scale.
Also the meta - tech-architecture and otherwise - seems to be turning back to DHH's favor, make of that what you will.