Aaron Patterson - Future of Developer Acceleration with Rails - Rails World 2023

Discover the future of developer acceleration with Rails, including the integration of language servers and other technologies to improve productivity, and explore the benefits of focusing on new features over performance.

Key takeaways
  • Ruby and Rails are optimized for general-purpose programming and writing web applications quickly.
  • Language Server Protocol (LSP) enables editors to get information about code and provide completion, definition, and hover functionality.
  • A simple sampling profiler can be implemented by starting a thread and printing out backtrace every 500 milliseconds.
  • A language server can be added to Rails to provide features such as syntax checking, jump to definition, and hover information.
  • Rust can help write lower-level code more safely, but it’s not necessary to use it.
  • Performance optimization can be used to answer questions like “what is fast enough?” and “how fast do we need to be?”
  • It’s possible to integrate a non-hacky version of LSP into Rails and have it come with Rails itself.
  • The author suggests that focusing on new features rather than performance can be beneficial in some cases.
  • The LSP protocol is not specific to any editor or language server, making it a common standard.
  • Some profilers pick intervals for you, so you don’t need to worry about it too much.
  • The author wants to encourage the audience and the Rails core team to adopt new technologies and features.
  • The future of developer acceleration with Rails involves integrating language servers and other technologies to improve productivity.
  • Key examples of setting expectations include answering the question “what is fast enough?” and focusing on new features rather than performance.