Interesting post. I've used Laravel for a few years now for work and personal projects, and I've really enjoyed it. I tried to test out Rails to explore other MVC web frameworks, and I just couldn't vibe with it. I think the major areas in which I was incompatible with Rails were:
- Lack of dependency injection/inversion of control. I find it interesting the author lists this as an advantage. With Rails, I was always a little anxious not knowing where things were defined or being implemented.
- Validation happens on models, not requests. With Laravel, I really appreciate being able to validate pretty much any data coming into the application regardless of whether or not it ends up in the database. With Rails, I tried to look for something similar to FormRequest and its validation rules, but I couldn't find many solutions. I think it might just be one of those things that's not the "Rails way".
- Perhaps more of a Ruby issue than a Rails issue, but the dynamism of the language - especially in its type system - was a bit of a drawback for me. I really appreciate PHP 8 and newer versions of Laravel for their support in type hinting and static analysis; being able to mouseover anything and know pretty confidently what I'm working with is a huge boon in my productivity.
I definitely agree with the author on a lot of the Laravel tooling stuff. I've learned to just kind of ignore most of the offerings outside of the core framework. I'm sure it's all great, but there's always a bit of churn in Laravel as the author mentioned so I'd rather save myself the future heartbreak.
Pretty much my experience as a frontend guy that had to fill in for a team reduction and had to start working on the Rails side of things. I always felt like I was just having to "know" what was going to happen. Unit tests, mocks, etc. were all coming back "ok" but there was always something in production that would act up. I had never this happen with the Java and PHP backends that I always had to touch up when there wasn't much talent available. Before I was let go from the Rails client I suggested that they invest in property based testing for all code as it was quite clear there were cases that weren't being thought of that existed in the application somewhere (undocumented, manually added, etc.).
> Lack of dependency injection/inversion of control. I find it interesting the author lists this as an advantage. With Rails, I was always a little anxious not knowing where things were defined or being implemented.
This is why i switched from rails to symfony even though I hadn't had experience with those kinds of systems before. I took to it rather well
> - Lack of dependency injection/inversion of control. I find it interesting the author lists this as an advantage. With Rails, I was always a little anxious not knowing where things were defined or being implemented.
Rails itself doesn´t have framework/library for DI/IOC but you can use constructors, I understand that a lot of Rails devs won't and just use wtv they need.
Ah, I think you're referencing the sidenotes. Sometimes the website doesn't render properly on mobile (I've tried getting click-to-expand working, but it's tricky), so try reading in desktop mode.
Regarding sidenote #1, I actually very deliberately did not mention the language or company ;) Here's the full text of the sidenote, if you're still unable to get it rendering:
> I'm not going to name the language itself, because this post would just turn into a flame war over that language specifically, and I definitely don't want to cast shade on any language/community in particular. I'm also kind of hoping that the most annoying people read this and think, "Ah, of course he's talking about that language over there! This criticism obviously doesn't apply to my perfect and favorite language!" Regardless, I feel that the thesis and content of this post applies pretty evenly to most functional programming languages.
> As I said, the problem is a classic one; it was formulated during the war, and efforts to solve it so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage.
Oh yeah, I had just heard about Talos Linux the other day in this blog post[0], and it seems super interesting. If I was all-in on Kubernetes, I'd probably consider it strongly. Unfortunately, though, there's other stuff that I want to run on the machines outside of the k8s cluster (like the BIND server I mentioned in the post).
Same, I originally had a bunch of RasPi's in my lab running differing versions of Raspbian until I got tired of the configuration drift and finally Nixified all of them. Writing a single Nix Flake and being able to build declarative SD card installation images for all of them makes managing a bunch of different machines an absolute dream (tutorial here[0], for those interested).
The only issue is remotely deploying Nix configs. The only first-party tool, nixops, is all but abandoned and unsupported. The community driven tools like morph and deploy-rs seem promising, but they vary in terms of Flakes support and how much activity/longevity they seem to have.
I agree. For most people just starting out, it's a lot more worthwhile to get a single cheapo repurposed desktop or a single Raspberry Pi to run PiHole or something on and then expand from there. My homelab[0] started as a single Pi running PiHole and has expanded to four machines running everything I need from Jellyfin to Calibre to DNS, etc.
That being said, when I finally got around to rackmounting and upgrading some of the other hardware in my lab, this "beginner"'s guide was really helpful.
Please, do not use Raspberry Pi for a homelab unless you are 100% sure your workload is OK with it. I've just sold mine after ~2 years it being in a box in a closet. It's just to weak, too useless. I value my power socket slot more that RPi. If ARM is important, especially Mac Mx, the lowest Mac Mini is not that expensive. RPi is close to zero in performance. It could be just some unnoticeable VM in Proxmox/AnotherHypervisor performance-wise.
I remember when I was diving deep into Docker for the first time a few years ago, I would have really appreciated seeing something like this. I wrote something kind of similar in a blog post [0], but that was only a semi-confident note to self that took quite a bit of digging through READMEs and GitHub issues. All the different container runtimes/engines/interfaces are really enough to make your head spin.
Mostly technical stuff, some non-technical stuff. I'm currently (indefinitely?) writing a series of posts documenting all the stuff I'm working on in my homelab, which has been fun.
Is there anywhere that this community tends to hang out/collaborate? Sounds super cool, but a quick Google of "lisp-machine-punk" doesn't bring up much :(
Where are you seeing that this is some kind of "protest" or display or righteousness? Could it not be that he just left the company because he personally enjoys working from home?
It’s clear from the content of the message that he wants more flexibility personally _and _that he wants to set an public example. I don’t see why this is a problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing good things and being seen to do good things.
- Lack of dependency injection/inversion of control. I find it interesting the author lists this as an advantage. With Rails, I was always a little anxious not knowing where things were defined or being implemented.
- Validation happens on models, not requests. With Laravel, I really appreciate being able to validate pretty much any data coming into the application regardless of whether or not it ends up in the database. With Rails, I tried to look for something similar to FormRequest and its validation rules, but I couldn't find many solutions. I think it might just be one of those things that's not the "Rails way".
- Perhaps more of a Ruby issue than a Rails issue, but the dynamism of the language - especially in its type system - was a bit of a drawback for me. I really appreciate PHP 8 and newer versions of Laravel for their support in type hinting and static analysis; being able to mouseover anything and know pretty confidently what I'm working with is a huge boon in my productivity.
I definitely agree with the author on a lot of the Laravel tooling stuff. I've learned to just kind of ignore most of the offerings outside of the core framework. I'm sure it's all great, but there's always a bit of churn in Laravel as the author mentioned so I'd rather save myself the future heartbreak.