
Shiny
What do you think is a good direction to go for someone with a Rails background?
Hey community, this is my first post here so I will try to be as concise as possible and I appreciate any feedback. I’ve been writing RoR apps for about 10 or 11 years now, and while I absolutely love the framework, I’m seeing that the market for opportunities is not what it used to be. This isn’t me declaring a framework dead or any of that business, just an observation. I’ve learned to love Ruby, so my question is for folks that maybe have used or loved it as well and moved to another language.
In short, what in your opinion is a good direction to go in terms of a language and framework with a Rails background? I don’t know that there is a wrong answer to this as it’s subjective, but I would love to hear your experience. I came to Ruby from PHP, and to PHP from Perl. My first language was C++ but that was back in the ANSI98 days so I’m very rusty there.
I have seen a lot of people doing both NodeJS and Python based projects. I do like the syntax of python so this was my gut but I don’t know a lot of the history or frameworks in the language. I also see a lot of Go, and some Rust out there as well. I’m willing to do research myself as well, and I think asking here is part of that research.
Again I appreciate any feedback from people.
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AstonJ
Hi Robert, welcome to Devtalk!
It sounds as though you are experiencing the AI effect, which many people think will hit dev jobs hard, first. There’s actually been quite a few AI related threads that you might find interesting: devtalk.com/ai (some companies already saying they’ve stopped hiring because of AI).
It’s almost certainly going to be an industry wide issue - but it will probably impact some languages or fields more than others and perhaps all equally at various points in time.
You might actually find becoming more expert in your current stack may be more beneficial, or widening your skills while remaining in the same space (for instance since you know Rails, what about looking into something like Hotwire Native? (You can win a copy of the book here)).
If you do want to explore other languages, Elixir and Phoenix may be worth a look - both inspired by Ruby and Rails and built for scalability.
I’d definitely look through the AI threads though.. quite a few articles and comments offering thoughts and advice.
Whatever you decide good luck and keep us posted! Hopefully others will be able to share their thoughts too

Shiny
Thank you Aston! I have only played with the Cursor IDE a little bit so I have a lot to learn there. Sounds like I have some reading to do in that space, and I appreciate your direction. I’ll keep you posted!
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