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This History of Rails in 10 Blog posts
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10-blog-posts.md

The History of Rails in 10 Blog Posts

Here are the notes for my RailsConf 2025 talk The History of Rails in 10 Blog Posts (video, slides)

Calling nostalgic veterans and newbies alike! We’re traveling through time on a tour of some of the most influential blog posts to hit the Rails community over the past two decades. With stops at iconic locations including in testing, service objects, and JavaScript, you won't want to miss it! Bring your chrono-passport and see you in 2003!

List of Articles

  1. FatModel, Skinny Controller - Foundational, refined what MVC means in the context of Rails
  2. Waiting for a Factory Girl - Changed the way the Rails community writes tests to this day
  3. 7 Patterns to Decompose Fat ActiveRecord Models - Most recommended for this list, changed the way Rails devs think about the model layer
  4. Rails is Omakase - More than just how the core team thinks of Rails, evolved into community shorthand for getting value by sticking to framework defaults
  5. The Wrong Abstraction - Shaped how we think around abstractiona and tradeoffs, still frequently quoted
  6. 12 Factor App - Most impactful article you've never read, the structure of your app is inspired by this
  7. Configuring Puma, Unicorn, and Passenger for Maximum Efficiency - stand-in for broader conversations around configurationa and performance, Nate is leader in this space
  8. Monoliths First - Rails community settled on monoliths as the most pragmatic starting architecture
  9. Beware of Service Objects in Rails - stand-in for the service object debate, see earlier work by Avdi Grimm and later work by Dave Thomas as well
  10. Should I use Hotwire or Frontend Framework - stand-in for the role of JavaScript in the Rails community, showcases community's pragmatic approach

A note on methodology

Blog posts selected are either iconic and impactful on their own, or stand in for a broader conversation the Rails community is having. I wanted to cover a broad cross-section of the community so I emphasized variety in a few different dimensions (full spectrum of years, all distinct authors, multiple different topics)

I used a few different approaches to source articles:

  • My own personal bookmarks and notes
  • Asked a variety of groups both IRL and online
  • Reached out to Peter Cooper who's been sharing articles via his newsletter Ruby Weekly for over a decade
  • Some existing lists already compiled around the internet
  • AI "Deep Research"
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