Rails is Good Enough
The first time I watched the infamous “build a blog in 15 mins” video, Dreamweaver was a thing, Flash was owned by Macromedia, and Twitter did not exist.
20 years later, Rails is alive and well. While it has never been the the most popular kid on the block by any means, it remains widely used by bootstrapped founders, large tech companies and everyone in between.
Learning programming after 40 with the goal of building a SaaS, going all-in on Rails was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Let me explain:
Rails is a monolith
When embarking on SaaS, I did start with the most popular framework: Next.js. All I wanted was a few database tables, user authentication, and some basic functionality. It did not go well.
It’s highly possible that mine was a skill issue. However, I found out was that JS ecosystem is heavily fragmented: for even the most basic piece of functionality, you either have to comb through a plethora of node packages or pay a VC-funded tech company a lot of money to solve problems that other frameworks solved more than a decade ago.
Rails on the other hand was extracted from Basecamp, one of the OG SaaS companies with thousands of paying customers. It does not aim to solve imaginary problems that do not exist, nor does it create new problems in order to reinvent the wheel. It comes out of the box with pretty much everything you need to build a SaaS application that you can run on a single VPS.
Rails is mature
Over the past two decades, many developers smarter and more experienced than I have generally agreed on the right way to do important things like authentication, and the not-so-important ones like naming conventions. I like not having to think about any of that, so I can focus on building a business and marketing.
Convention over configuration means I can open any open-source repo and know exactly where to look. And if I get stuck, I can hire a Rails developer and they can get to work right away.
To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, “the longer a technology has been around, the more likely it is to continue being around.” Rails exemplifies this principle.
Rails is productive
One of the most underrated features of Rails is that it attracts the kind of people that are more interested in just building things than debating tech.
Most of the bootstrapped, successful, solo-founder SaaS businesses I admire use Rails, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s something about picking a stack that just works.
Of course it’s entirely possible to bootstrap a successful SaaS company with any stack, but to me it just seems that monoliths such as Rails or those inspired by it are more common than not.
Rails is good enough
Yes, the learning curve can be steep, and the “magic” can sometimes be frustrating. But for 80% of the cases in building modern web applications, Rails is good enough. It is battle-tested, it is messy, it is beautiful, and most importantly, it gets the job done.
There are so many details to get right when building a business, and there’s beauty in not having to worry about the tech.
Happy 20th anniversary, Rails!