Rails and the Next 5 Years

After a few flirtatious encounters with Ruby, I left .NET in 2009. I was looking for something better, something where I didn’t use an IDE, something where I didn’t feel like I was fighting the entire culture, and a place I could be happy being a devloper again.

I found Rails. I found open source. I found Ruby. And I found myself.

Ruby/Rails to me: a community where people help each other learn, full of interesting and fun challenges, and a desire to learn the entire stack from UNIX to CSS.

Fast forward 5 years; I’ve been thinking about what the next 5 years will look like, for both me specifically and for web/mobile application in general.

It’s fairly clear to me that most medium to large’ish apps won’t be a single Rails app with 100 controllers. That dog has tried to hunt, and well… that dog won’t hunt. OneLargeRailsApp is not the future.

Rails isn’t going away. I will still use it for prototyping and for applications where expressiveness is key (billing code and administration of data are two examples). Rails will become part of the puzzle, not the whole thing. I don’t envision anything being the entire puzzle anymore. Too much awesome tech which each do one thing super awesomely.

Prediction: apps in this half-decade will be split up

• Many Apps (iOS/android, some rails, some Ember, some R, some Go)
• Depending on your worldview, gsub/Go/Node|Elixir/

I don’t anticipate quote-unquote leaving Rails. There’s no need to leave like there was a need for me to flee .NET. Instead, the communities will merge together under an open-source umbrella. I doubt there will be one big huge community in which you do ALL of your development.

The future, in my opinion, is many languages. Many communities. Many meetups.

Bring on the future!

(and my hoverboards. and jetpacks. and flying cars)