Rafael França - Frontiers of development productivity in Rails - Rails World 2024

Rails is optimized for developer happiness and productivity but initial setup/onboarding remains challenging for beginners

Development containers (dev containers) offer a standardized way to configure development environments:

• Reusable across team members
• Disposable and repeatable
• Platform-independent
• Faster than traditional VMs
• Supports multiple editors (VS Code, RubyMine, etc.)

Rails 7.2 includes built-in dev container support:

• Can generate dev container config with rails new --dev-container
• Pre-configured with necessary dependencies
• Works with existing Rails applications

Common development environment pain points addressed by dev containers:

• Ruby version management complexity
• Database dependencies
• System-level package requirements
• Editor/IDE configuration
• Cross-platform compatibility

Dev container architecture benefits:

• Composable features and images
• High level of customization
• Consistent environment across team
• No file syncing overhead
• Better performance than VM-based solutions

Areas for Rails productivity improvement:

• Better editor integration
• Enhanced static typing support
• Improved LSP (Language Server Protocol) implementation
• CLI tools without JavaScript dependencies
• More investment in development tooling

The community should focus on:

• Maintaining Rails’ doctrine of developer happiness
• Improving initial developer experience
• Building better tooling for code analysis
• Enhancing static typing capabilities
• Standardizing development environments