• Vinyl Records: Found vinyl records from late grandfather, highlighting its ability to play without issues and representing a key shift in music distribution with accessible printing and sharing, still functional in an evolving world.
• Old Websites: Plaintext websites from the 1990s work in modern browsers, while web technologies have added capabilities like CSS, JavaScript, and websockets over time, but the foundation remains pages, forms, and sessions.
• Ruby on Rails: Emerged 20 years ago as a unified approach to building interactive, database-powered web applications, became the foundation for many successful companies, and packages web development best practices into an accessible toolkit, concentrating on data validation and storage.
• Effective Tools: Illustrates with cars, where complex tasks are simplified through abstraction. Ruby on Rails simplifies web development by abstracting away technical details, allowing developers to focus on building products.
• JavaScript and Next.js: Gained prominence after Rails' success, enabling websites to have iPhone app functionality. Next.js is a frontend-focused framework for building startups, with dynamic loading states and server-side rendering, driving modern web innovation and enabling quick, customized products.
• Rails' Relevance: Continues to be relevant despite the rise of Next.js, with new projects choosing it for simplicity and abstraction. It has evolved over 20 years by adding JavaScript interactivity, backend job management, loading states, and real-time application tools, and can handle various application patterns while maintaining its HTML-based foundation.
• Building Web Apps: New wave of JavaScript web frameworks like Next.js makes building web apps more complex with more capabilities but less abstraction. Next.js competes with native iPhone apps, and using cutting-edge frameworks introduces instability. Rails is still the simplest and most abstracted way to build web applications for solo developers and enterprise teams.
• Personal Experience: Built [Find AI] with Rails and [Chroma Cloud] with Next.js, each suitable for different project needs. Rails has shown age in the era of AI-powered applications but remains effective.
• Final Thoughts: Users care more about product utility than implementation details. In the technology world, we can enjoy the polish of new applications while recognizing the value of older ones.