- The one thing that has always put me off of Ruby on Rails is the upgrade story. It looks like a massive pain to keep updated, and an even bigger pain to bring up to date if you don't stay on the update treadmill.
- I initially built my saas product in Rails. It was great, for a while.
Updating was a source of anxiety that led to rewriting the service in another language. It was a real pain... gem X would depend on Y. Y would need version Z of Ruby and Rails version W. You try to update X by updating Y and everything breaks apart. Same story for 15 other gems you depend on. You end up in a web of crazy dependencies. This is even worse if you use a heavy Rails engine (like rails admin, etc).
You eventually get backed into a corner and you "live with it" like the author of the post described, until you rewrite it.
- The "Learning on the job" section brought back some memories of my experiences solo-developing a rails app. I made some of the same mistakes, although I think I mostly made the mistake of avoiding learning. I knew I should be writing tests with minitest or rspec, but never made time to learn it (instead I rolled my own request test framework!) And I stuck with subversion because I didn't fancy learning this newfangled git thing. When it finally came to hiring a second developer they had to teach me these things, and they thought I was an idiot :-(
