I just found out about The Odin Project, a self-paced online course to learn full stack web development. There are two paths: one is Ruby on Rails and the other is full JavaScript and nodejs. I am leaning more towards Ruby but I wanted to get some more opinions from folks in the field.
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From what I can tell (maybe it’s just jobs around me) employers are not really looking for ruby devs. Since you’ll have to learn JavaScript anyway for the frontend I don’t see a reason to go ruby beyond personal challenge.
As a front-end developer with 10 years of experience, I’d suggest going with JavaScript. It’s one language for both stacks, you can learn the core front and back end ideologies, and if you decide to go with a different language for back-end, it shouldn’t take too much time to learn afterwards. From my experience it would be easier both to learn and potentially to get a job in the field.
You will not find much to do with Ruby. Node is more popular and more in demand. A lot companies and OSS project have o Node. Ruby is very niche.
I thought Ruby was still pretty relevant given that Mastodon is essentially coded in Ruby but I am coming to the same conclusion you are based on another person’s comment.
Ruby is used in some large, older existing projects (e.g. GitLab, Redmine, Puppet) but my impression is that a lot of them do not have very much active development of the Ruby parts going on any more.
I am seriously curious here: Why has popularity of Ruby declined?
Probably a few reasons for this. I’m not a ruby dev so take this with a grain of salt.
Ruby doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond languages like Python or Go without its companion web development framework Rails. Ruby on Rails was good for its time (~2012 -> 2015 era was peak), but there are more mature, stable, and widely adopted frameworks available in other languages. RoR touted speed to develop as a feature, but you can do things plenty fast with the aforementioned languages too. On the flip side, rails apps are notoriously slow to boot. I think this became a problem with cloud native infrastructure. For example, Kubernetes likes to spin up services very quickly, and can be painful to work with if that’s not an option (experienced this with Java apps too for that matter). As self hosting on bare metal went by the wayside, so too did interest in developing new apps on rails, imho.
Interesting! Thank you for the perspective. I am seeing a trend of smaller businesses that are bringing services back on premises and self-hosting but I have no interest in working for a small business. I’ve been there, done that, and it was hell.
I didn’t know about the Odin Project, looks super interesting so thanks!
You’re welcome! I am going to work on it slowly but surely. It’s going to be up to me to elevate myself out of my own miserable circumstances. The key to life improvement, I have always maintained, is lifelong education. Yeah, I ain’t no spring chicken compared to the kids coming out with degrees but I can probably hang with them with some effort.
To add on to the other top comment right now, it’s not like learning a spoken language. Once you know one, you can pick up another similar language without too much bother. Or should be able to, if you’re not crap.
As for what employers want to see, that’s something I’m less qualified to tell you.
Go the JavaScript route. React is the most popular front end technology rn, and Node is also really common. You’ll have the best chance at either contributing to projects, or getting a job this way