tenthconcept
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2013–2025
16:12 · 428K views · Nov 8, 2005
David Heinemeier Hansson builds a blog engine with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes, the demo that launched Rails' momentum.
HN treats it as the model for a compelling developer demo and a benchmark for how simple web development once felt.
14 comments from Hacker News
Ruby on Rails demo by DHH back in 2005/6. I was blown away that he created a blog application with comments in 15 minutes, I was working on Asp.NET back then and it would have taken me about a week to do that. this video
I think a good example to follow for your project is the original Rails announcement video by DHH: this video Maybe you can do a similar app in way less time!
When I started learning to code few years ago, tutorials were always, "how to create a blog ?" because it shows everything (authentication, crud, nested view, rights). Then javascript framework came out. It was so hard that they move to just a todolist tutorial because even the creator didn't know how to create a blog with their new cool tech. Some blogger were still able to understand how to use it and release todolist tutorial with authentication to demonstrate authentication, session management and rights. Then new cool javascript framework came out and now it was even harder to code, creators weren't able to develop a todolist because it was too hard so their tutorial was just a basic counter application. Now with nextjs we are even a step further. The developers don't know how to use it (is it even possible ?) so the tutorials show just how to "start" an application, load css and how to create a route. In just a few years we came from create a full application to not even know how to do a todolist. (Imagine form validation, it must be so hard !!!). Everybody seems happy and very productive. It must be myself. In 15 years we came from 15 minutes to create a blog with this old tech to a few days of work. That's a lot of progress we don't have to reload the page ! this video
Rails is now like Java EE because it is no longer better than the competition. It's not that Rails got worse. Perhaps in simplicity it did get worse a bit, but overall Rails now is much better than Rails then. The thing is that the competition got a lot better too. The baseline changed. I don't think the thing that will be to Rails as Rails was to Java EE exists yet though. The competition has merely caught up, perhaps a little ahead on some fronts and a little behind on others. But there is nothing that is clearly much much better. Things like Meteor and Opa are a step in the right direction, but they don't go far enough (yet). Does anybody remember this video: this video This is not the original Rails video, it's the second one I think, but they're fairly similar (couldn't find the original). Back then when I saw the first Rails video I remember finding it amazing. Now it's just boring.
I know you're at least half joking, but for me it actually is the year of linux on the desktop. As a developer who does server-side stuff, a mac was an obvious easy choice for a long time -- a tradition that has been widespread going at least as far back as dhh's intro to rails development using textmate [1]. What does that open source crowd want now? They want to build OCI/docker containers and deploy them to kubernetes clusters. You can do that on mac, but these containers need to run on a linux kernel, so the setup winds up as containers on a VM on the host OS. If your dev machine is linux, you can remove the VM layer in between and the setup is simpler and more efficient. I think that might push a lot of developers from mac to linux. I just got a new dev machine recently and it's a linux laptop. [1] this video