Background
This article is based on my one of the Reddit discussion. I started this discussion 2 months ago to know the current situation of Ruby on Rails market. More than 15 people are activetly participated in the discussion. Here I have summarized this discussion.
Link to the Reddit Discussion Ruby on Rails Dev Shops
My question was as follows:
Hey folks!đź‘‹
Few years ago (13/14..18/19) there was a trend of starting and running Dev Shops focusing on Ruby and Ruby based frameworks (including Rails/React/ReactNative etc.). Now, I can see only few Dev Shops (Thoughtbot, Hashrocket, Railsware) are exists. Many of them are closed and many are diverting to different tech stack.
Is it really difficult to run a Dev Shop based on Ruby and Rails? What is your experience?
Medxb says:
I own and operate a RoR Software company. We are headquartered in Dubai but most of our Engineers are based out of our Brazil hub. RoR is less popular in the Middle East and most of Asia so we do sometimes work with other stacks but we mostly work with RoR and encourage our clients to use RoR. Those that listen our advice rarely regret it.
orange-wolf says:
There are still quite a few small to mid consultancies specializing in Rails out there. 2022 was an especially hard year for it here in the USA, so we did see some shops close or consolidate. For example my company, Notch8, which had been around since 2007, is now a part of Scientist.com. We’ve rebranded to SoftServ, but we are still doing Rails and React Mobile work.
We have very loyal customers and so we still have work, but we are in a position to take on a new big project almost right away. That’s pretty rare for us. Our pipeline is usually 6-12 months. The last time we had an opening like this was 2015.
I speak with other companies stateside regularly and many of them did well in 2020, but found work dried up or the sales cycle got very long in 2022 due to possibly recession fears and venture capital issues.
enzod0 says:
I’m pretty sure it depends on your location. While there are globally popular stacks or libraries like React, each country has its own programming traditions, and companies often tend to emulate successful local counterparts, or they look for the most cost-effective tools. For instance here (South America), there’s a good number of companies working with Ruby on Rails. In fact I currently work for one startup where almost all of their clients’ projects are developed using RoR. Java + Spring is another popular stack here. So yeah, I think it depends on the location.
alhafoudh says:
I run a RoR dev shop in Central Europe for 10+ years. We use Rails as our primary tech stack along with React if the project is fit. We use Flutter or native for mobile.
I find Rails to be the only one full-featured framework that can suite 99% of our projects. We also built deep expertise in Rails over the years. The Rails pitch “from HELLO WORLD to IPO” still applies today, but as was said, Rails is less popular nowadays.
I think that today’s junior programmers go blindly with the hype which currently is JavaScript (… and friends). Not thinking into the future. Rails is mature, has great community and support.
Anyway I put hope to the new “The Rails Foundation” to put Rails back on track (pun intended). :-
jeniceek says:
It depends of salesperson ability to sell IMHO. In my company, we still do development in Rails, but frontend moved to React. It’s easier to find devs for and most RoR devs in company don’t want to waste time on frontend. Compared to other technologies, the development is maybe 40 % faster. Most RoR devs are looking for Phoenix framework as RoR replacement, but there is still plenty of work in RoR.
Conclusion
From above discussion what I can say is, there still many Rails DevShops (small to large) are existing and doing great job. These companies are handling challenging Rails projects and promoting Ruby and Rails. We can see there are many Ruby and Rails conferences are happening all around the world. This shows Ruby, Rails and Rails community is getting strong again.
Let’s make Ruby great again!!!
Mention your Ruby DevShop in the comment. Thanks