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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.

11 comments

/ruby /rails #help-needed

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2025-07-10 00:55:23 UTC

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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

Post #2

LeamHall

I love Ruby more than any other language I’ve played with, but it just doesn’t have market share and I need to pay the bills. I moved to Python; closer to Ruby than Go or JS, and a lot of market share. You have a Rails background, are you open to growing your skills outside of that niche? Python is everywhere; web, data science, security, AI, etc…etc…etc…

If you really want to stay in the web frontend space, JS/Typescript end to end is one option. Another is to do Go or Python with some JS support like Bootstrap, but I’ve seen talk that many JS framework people are going back to pure JS, maybe with something else (Go, Python) in the backend.

Not sure of your cloud skills, but I’d recommend AWS and move in that direction as well. With AWS Lambda you can skip the server and build a nicely automated workflow.

I’ve migrated my career multiple times, so let me encourage you: it can be done! Find what you love, do it very well, and you can beat challenges over the head, with enthusiasm.

Post #4

ckrailo

While it doesn’t have the marketshare of JS or Python, Elixir (with Phoenix or Ash for framework) is super cool. The BEAM and OTP have so many distilled lessons from decades of networked things (like telephony).

Post #6