RailsConf 2014 - Curmudgeon: An Opinionated Framework by Ernie Miller

ERNIE MILLER: Good afternoon everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good afternoon.

E.M.: How's it going?

AUDIENCE: It's going good! Hi Ernie!

E.M.: Hi. My name's Ernie Miller. I work for

a company called Appriss in Louisville, Kentucky.
Please ask

me about them later so that I can justify

expensing the trip.

AUDIENCE: Whoo!

[applause]

E.M.: If I could ask you all to do

me a favor, as it turns out, most of

my fellow co-workers that had come out to
RailsConf

have had to catch a flight to go back

home, and so they're missing my talk. And
so

what I'd like you to do is to Tweet

very enthusiastically about the talk, regardless
of if it's

very good, so that, you know, for at least

until it goes on video, they're gonna think
they

missed the talk of a lifetime.

So, RailsConf, huh? Have you guys had a good

times?

AUDIENCE: Whoo!

[applause]

E.M.: Yeah? Yeah.

I've had a ball, too. I've had a ball,

too.

So.

AUDIENCE: Ah, yeah!

E.M.: I am not.

AUDIENCE: [indecipherable - 00:01:10]

E.M.: Yes. Yes it was.

So, I am not a member of Ruby core.

I am not a member of Rails core. However,

last month, this game came out, and I'm an

avid gamer, and I'd like to happily report
that

I am very frequently a member of Damage core,

at this point.

Unfortunately, membership only lasts for about
fifteen seconds at

a time. Then I get booted again. So, so

there is that. But, you know, I'm thinking,
you

know, it's, it's moving up in the world. I'm

a member of something core.

So, so, it's come to my attention recently
that

I have been giving a fair number of talks

that usually involve me ranting about something,
and I

think I'm becoming a bit of a curmudgeon.

[applause]

So, you're not supposed to clap for that.

[laughter]

OK. So, one of the things that I want

to start off by doing is saying that I

recognize that most of us would not be in

this room if it weren't for Rails, and that

we really owe a lot of our opportunity to

get paid for doing Ruby, I know I do

anyway, to Rails's existence. So, first off,
I'd like

to get a hand for Rails and how awesome

it is and how it enables us to do

everything.

[applause]

OK. OK. Nope. Nope. That's enough. Nope. No
more.

We're done celebrating.

[laughter]

Just that much celebration. Nothing more.

[laughter]

OK. All right. Stop the part.

So. That. That gets me every time.

So, that being the case, I, I have to

say, a lot of us have been hitting brick

walls. How many of you have been building
something

relatively complex with Rails, and you sort
of feel

like you've, you've gone up against a brick
wall.

You can't make anymore forward progress and
you feel

like you've been kind of, you know, so- yeah,

OK. So some hands are going up right.

And, and, and so it seems to me, like,

if there is that much talk about it, you

know, it seems like we often get the response

that, you know, we just need to run with

more passion at the wall. Run faster. And,
and

if we just fully commit that we'll burst through

and we'll be in this sort of magical land

where everything works the way that it's supposed
to,

and just don't fight so much, right?

I have to think that if so many of

us have kind of run into these sort of

problems, that maybe there's something there.
Maybe there's, there's

some kind of an issue there, and I wanted

to give a few opinions about, you know, why

that might be.

So, Rails is a convention over configuration
advocate, right.

That's, that's the big thing that we always
talk

about, that we would prefer to have convention
over

configuration. Now, conventions are really
what, what opinions want

to be when they grow up, right. So, most

conventions have stemmed from an opinion.
We hopefully share

the opinion, but I want to be clear that,

when I talk about the opinions that Rails
has

today, I am not talking specifically about
any members

of the core team. I'm not talking about the

people, though the software may in fact reflect
opinions

of people, what I want to talk about is

what does the software tell us, right?

Because we know that Rails is opinionated
software. So,

with that out of the way, let's go with

the first opinion that Rails, Rails has, that
I

believe Rails has anyway, which is that code
should

read like English. And we see this pretty
frequently

in comparisons between straight-up Ruby versus
Rails kind of

code, right, so.

Here's something that a lot of us actually
like.

Like, I know this is one of the things

that hooked me on Rails right off the bat,

was like, oh, I can say, like, five dot

days ago, or, you know, because I'm writing
something

in old English, I can say one dot fortnight.from_now.

That's very useful. Right.

So there's nothing particular, when we say
like, one

dot megabyte, right, there's, there's nothing
megabyte-y about the

number, right. It just does some multiplication.

Similarly, we have some, oh yeah. Fortnight.
Yeah. Similarly,

we have some differences where we have something
that

array already has, for instance, on it, like
the

sh- I just found out it's called the shovel

operator. I always just said less than less
than,

but whatever it is, right. So we have, like,

array less than less than object, right, and
we've,

we've got that alias to append, so that we

can say append.

We have object dot in, so we can ask

whether an object is in an array include of

ask an array whether it has an object. Things

like that.

We have string methods that have been, you
know,

kind of patched in for, for instance, the
string

inquirer. That's one of my, one of my favorite

ones. Right in the middle there, we have a

check on the left. In Ruby, you simply ask

if the environment string equals production.
But in Rails,

there's a thing called a string inquirer,
which simply

patches method_missing so that you can actually
say, OK.

Is the string actually containing the method
that you

just sent minus the question mark? And so,
that's

really all its doing - the thing on the

left.

Here's another one. So, in time, we can say

beginning_of_day, we can say midnight, we
can sat at_midnight,

we can say at_beginning_of_day. We can say
midday, noon,

at_midday, at_noon, at_middle_of_day, right.
They're all the same thing,

and yet there's this really clean API that's
exposed

this whole change thing, right. It's fairly
discoverable. Like,

I could make a reasonable guess that if I

said change_minute to something, or if I said
change

any piece of the time to something, it would

be able to do exactly what I ask it

to do just then. But instead we have these,

these aliases that allow us to write code
that's

like English.

Now, when I go into a coffee shop and

I want something that's got a high caffeine
content,

I may order one of these. You all know

what this is, right. This is coffee brewed
by

forcing a small amount of nearly boiling water
under

pressure through finely ground coffee beans.
And that's what

I go up to the counter and ask for,

right.

Nope. You know. They'd probably go, you mean
an

espresso, right? Because espresso is what
we call a

loan word. We borrowed that word from Italian
because

it was concise, it was a good way to

say what it was that, that we wanted to

say without all of those words, right.

Ruby is a language in-and-of-itself. It borrows
from English

where it makes sense. But it is my opinion,

anyway, that if there is a concise way to

say something in Ruby, we don't necessarily
need to

borrow a loan word in English. You know how

you sit across the table from that guy who

always like to use a foreign word for something

just to sound clever, right? Right. That's
what we're

doing, right. Like, it doesn't make a lot
of

sense.

Now, here's one you may initially disagree
with. I

believe that Rails believes that models descend
from ActiveRecord,

or at the very least an ORM. Now, if

you disagree with me, I have three words for

you. Rails generate model.

What do you get? You get an ActiveRecord subclass,

right. Now, you might say, well that's silly,
right.

But this is the first exposure that Rails
developers

are likely to have to what goes in a

model's directory, and I have talked to extremely
smart

developers who have told me that they went
a

number of years before they realized they
could stick

plain-old Ruby classes in app models, because
they just

thought that, that's not what models are.
Right?

And so, rightfully so then, Rails believes
that the

data is the domain, right. That's the ActiveRecord
pattern.

That's the whole point of it. And if you

don't believe me, I'll show you some README
information,

right.

The prime directive is that we're minimizing
the code

needed to build a real-world domain model.
Lots of

reflection and runtime extension is the understatement
of the

year. And magic is not inherently a bad word.

Now, what this really comes down to is, is

Rails was very much a reaction to very configuration-heavy

frameworks in Java, XML files and the like.
Big

reaction to that, right. So what we had determined

at that point was that configuration is the
devil,

right. And once you have, once you have determined

that there is a greater evil out there, then

a lot of lesser evils start to seem pretty

great by comparison, right. So you can rationalize
yourself

into a really tricky spot.

And so, our goal is to be able to

write class Post inherits from ActiveRecord::Base
end and have

magic happen, right. Like, for instance, we
infer, and

I want to talk a little about, about one

thing that we do in that case, right. We

infer what the attributes should be on that,
on

that model without writing a single line of
code.

Now, there's a problem with that. Namely,
that in

order to infer the attribute names, you must
first

invent the universe. So I want to walk us

through what that looks like. We're gonna
do one

deep dive into some Rails internals, and then
I

promise we'll come back up for air and we'll,

we'll talk about happy things.

So, so you might imagine pretty, pretty early
on,

that we're gonna go ahead and initialize a
module,

and we're gonna actually have a module to
store

our attribute methods in. That's actually
something I kind

of like, right, because as a Rubyist, I expect

to be able to call super if I define

my own method on the class, so that makes

a lot of sense, right.

So if we look at what happens when we

generate the module, we have a new anonymous
module

that extends Mutex, cause we don't want to
be

modifying the module from two different threads.

And, then in method_missing, we have this
handy little

hook that defines the attribute methods, right.
And so,

in method_missing, we call this every single
time, right.

And the idea being that once we've defined
the

methods, they're, we're not gonna hit method_missing,
at least

for those methods anymore.

And so we bail out, if, in fact, we've

already generated them. And we call super
with column

names, right. Now, where do we get column
names

from? Well, it's not there. In fact, method_missing
was

the only thing that actually sits on, on the

instance level. The rest of the stuff that
we're

gonna be looking at sits on the singleton.
It

sits on the subclass of ActiveRecord itself
as a

class method.

So, when we call super, we're actually calling
super

into ActiveModels. Definition of defining
attributes, right. So we're

saying, define attributes methods from ActiveModel.
We're passing it

the column names. So here's column names.
Well, column

names is, again, a singleton method. It knows
that

it needs columns, right. And below here, we
have

columns.

Well, columns needs the connections, for starters,
to the

database to talk, to figure out, you know,
what

table it's gonna read from. And it also needs

to determine table name, right. So now we
need

to know the table name. So we don't have

the table name yet, so we call a reset

table name, and most of the time I'm gonna

skip past some of the, some of the more

convoluted things and just talk about the
compute table

name, right. So we have to compute the table

name. It makes sense, right?

So, this is kind of a big method. Hopefully

you all can see the, the part that matters,

which is we call undecorated table name with
the,

again, we're sitting on the class. So name
refers

to class dot name, right. The string name
of

the class. The full module name.

And, undecorated table name basically does
exactly what you

see here. Let's say we have a namespace model,

Conferences::RailsConf becomes RailsConf becomes
rails underscore conf becomes rails_confs,

OK. Which is great. And then, of course, if

we have Animals::Moose it becomes Moose it
becomes moose

it becomes mooses. Which makes lots of sense,
right?

Well, that means we need to handle irregular
pluralization.

So we check and we see whether or not

there's a default pluralization to find for
moose. There

is not. There, there, there are some interesting
ones,

I think. We've got, like, sheep. We do have

sheep, so we're at least in the ball park.

We have jeans. We have fish. But we don't

have moose.

So, we go into an initializer and we set

inflect.uncountable "moose" and then it works,
right. But. Configuration.

Or we can say self dot table_name equal 'moose'

and then bypass all of that altogether, right.
But,

again, configuration.

Now, if configuration is the devil and magic
is

the goal, then we have to think to ourselves,

what is, what is magic, really? And, and an

enjoyable magic trick is basically willful
suspension of disbelief,

right. So, that is, if this magician came
up

and said, I'm going to saw my assistant in

half, and you didn't think, there's a trick
here,

like, it's based in the rules of reality,
like,

there's something going on. It would be pretty
horrified,

right. We'd be like, I don't be- where have

I gone? Like, what is going on here, right?

And so there is this level where we would

do better to consider, how can we root this

kind of magic in some reality that the average

person is going to be able to understand?
And

then kind of build on that knowledge, sort
of

scaffold, if you will. And, otherwise, you
end up

with what I, what I referred to as douche

bag magic, which magic that bites you, magic
that

screws you over in all sorts of wonderful
ways.

So, let's imagine, for a moment, a world,
a

world where we do have magic that we can

understand. And, so let's just say we have
ImaginaryRecord::Record

that always asks us to configure a table name.

That always asks us to define the attributes
in

a very mapper style, data mapper style. Right?

Given an attribute name, tell it's how its
to

load the attributes. Tell it how to load the

attributes. Maybe some other stuff. We don't,
we're just,

we're imagining here, right. We're, we're
just in your

imagination.

And then let's say that we have a MagicRecord

that inherits from the ImaginaryRecord::Record,
and does all the

same stuff that we did before, except it calls

these methods on the class in order to set

the table name programmatically, in order
to set the

attributes programmatically, right.

Well, that would be pretty cool. We would
have

to make some trade offs, but we'd basically
get

to the point where we could do something like

inherit from MagicRecord and get the exact
same behavior

as we wanted. But as a freebie, now we

have the ability to drop down another layer,
if

we want. And to actually define this stuff
with

less magic.

And you say, well that's great. So that's
attributes.

We kind of understand that. That's pretty
simple, right.

Big whoop. ActiveRecord also does all these
other things,

I mean, you know, it's got like attribute
typecasting

and associations and serializations and secure
passwords and transactions

and macro reflection and nested attributes,
time stamps, lifecycle

callbacks, validations, dirty tracking, mass
assignment, sanitation, to name

some, and oh, by the way, we have querying

and persisting, right. That's kind of a important
thing

in a persistence library.

And so, I say yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's.
That's

an interesting problem that we have, right.
Because they're

all kind of living in one place, and how

do you expose this kind of interface, this
kind

of way of interacting with, with your library,
to

cover all of these things. And my answer would

be basically that you, you don't. You, you
allow

this to tell you maybe I've got a crazy

idea.

So, this is the ancestry chain of, of an

ActiveRecord::Base subclass. I just wanted
to show it to

you real quickly. Now, yeah. Yeah. Three cheers
for

the, for the ancestry chain of ActieRecord::Base.
So, somebody's

clapping. Oh no. Right.

SO, in Rails we call this clarity. You may

have heard that earlier. Because API surface
area is

irrelevant. We don't care about that. In other
words,

the Single Responsibility Principle is super
simple for sufficiently

large values of responsibility. Like, if you're
responsibility is

to do everything, then you just say, OK, gotta

do everything. It's gotta work, right. That's
my responsibility.

Well, it works. All right. Done.

And so awhile back, actually last weekend,
I Tweeted

some of these statistics about an observation
on an,

a brand new Rails 4.1 app, what a subclass

of ActiveRecord has, what the view has, and
what

the controller has in terms of ancestors,
public protected

class methods, public protected instance methods,
and same for

private methods, right.

Now, look. It may very well be that this

is exactly the API size that we need. I'm

not gonna argue that one way or the other

right now. But what I will say is that

there are other ways to get there. Just because

we want these methods does not mean they all

actually have to be implemented in modules
that are

included onto the class.

And so what I'm getting at is that, it's

very, very hard to keep track of just what

you're doing. I've been writing Rails for
over seven

years. I'm not exactly sure how long at this

point. But, I know that, since I've been doing

it, I still have to have documentation open
most

of the time when I'm doing anything serious.
Like,

maybe I'm just dumb. Possible. I don't know.
But

I need documentation. It's a really big namespace
to

try to keep in your head all at one

point.

So, this is on, online at GitHub, and you

are free to do science to verify my empirical

observations and see whether or not they are
accurate,

and I would love to see PRs to this

repo, actually, with, you know, different
versions of Rails

to see how things have changed, complexity-wise.

Now, it's not enough really for ActiveRecord
to just

do this on its own. It actually encourages
us

to do this, right. Rails has this whole helper

thing, right. And, let me give you an example

of something I actually encountered and, I'm
embarrassed to

say, spent like half a day trouble shooting
with

the, with helpers.

So, I decided I had a really great idea,

and I was gonna use something that I heard

that OO developers like to do, which is polymorphism,

and use it at the view layer, right. And

I'm like, I can have something that is summarizable,

and so I might have a helper for posts

that's summary, and I might have a helper
for

reviews that's summary.

And I can share a partial that prints that

summary in an appropriate way for that particular
thing,

right. That seemed pretty cool. So this is
how

it would look in a partial. And in development

it worked wonderfully. It worked exactly the
way I

expected. And then I deployed to production.

Now, how many of you think it worked? Right.

How many of you think it didn't work. Well,

it's kind of a trick question, because honestly
you

can't really tell me, because you don't have
enough

information right now. Because there's this
thing, right.

OK, so, seven years ago, there was a commit

to Rails that said, we are going to make

it default assumption you want all helpers
all the

time. No comment.

And, for a long period of time, I'd like

to imagine it was some kind of a dark

age in Rails. There was really no way to

opt out of this, per se, until a patch

came in that added include all helpers as
a

configuration option. So I thought, this is
great. I

found this, now I found this after hours of

searching, like, because I just somehow missed
the memo

that we had done that. It was way back

in 2.3, like, this has been the way for

awhile, right.

But, like I just kind of assume, like, it's

named post_helper, it should help posts. Not,
like, other

things. But that's not how it works. So there's

this kind of big namespace, right. And so,
I

would recommend that nearly all of you consider
adding

this to to your application dot rb. You will

be much more sane for it. If you're going

to use helpers, at the very least, having
a

namespace that you can kind of control. If
you

want to be available to all controllers, then
throw

it in application_helper or have a module.
You can

still use modules, I hear. It works.

Now, we did all this in the name of

convenience, right. Convenience is, is going
to trump everything

else. We want convenient usage at expense
of anything

else. And, you know, so I own a house.

And I think to myself often that, you know,

when nature calls, I have, like, to get up

and like, go to a special room to go

do my business, right.

[laughter]

And I mean that's really inconvenient. So
like, why

don't I just install a toilet, like, in every

room in the house, right? Because then, like,
if

I'm watching the tube, it doesn't matter you
know.

Do my thing. It's all good. but the problem

with that is, right, that first off, you've
got,

like, plumbing now to help support this, this
aspiration

of having a toilet in every room. And plumbers

are expensive and, like, stuff breaks and
then it's

like, I've got a leak and I've got damage

and stuff, and then the other problem is,
like,

every room is a toilet, right.

So, I would encourage you to consider that
if

this is kind of what you're looking for, if

a giant namespace of, of, of methods and functions

is what you would really like to have, then

have I got the language for you.

It is super convenient, like, everything is
at arm's

length. What's that? You want to do something
with

a string and an array, yeah, doesn't matter.
MySQL,

sure. Absolutely. I mean, just a thought.

So now another, another Rails opinion is,
who needs

classes when we've got modules? And I say
this

primarily because of one interesting piece
of code, which

is ActiveSupport::Concern. So, ActiveSupport::Concern
you may think is mainly

for having a convention around having a class
methods

module inside your module. And instance methods
and so

forth. But it's not.

The problem the it's designed to solve is
that,

in this world, the Ruby world, the one that

we live in lots of times, we, we actually

would have to include. There's a lot of extension

onto a class, right, when you include a module

in the Rails world. Like, a lot of the

modules that Rails is built on go and do

metaprogramming and add methods to the singleton
or whatever

onto the class itself, right.

And if you're adding stuff to the singleton,
then

it's not sufficient for you to go ahead and,

and do that in a module that is itself

included, right. Because when it gets included
in the

module, it modifies the module singleton,
not the class

singleton. With me so far?

Right. This is a huge problem. So. So let's

solve it. Now, we have this ability to have

dependencies that get trapped by ActiveSupport::Concern,
so that each

singleton knows what, what its dependencies
are, and then

at the time that you include the, the dependency

that you're really looking for, it can also
go

back and include into your module all the
other

ones that it needed, and so then that way

they can do their metaprogramming magic on
your singleton

instead of their singleton.

It's great. And it's, you know, so what it

is is that there was this, this, this problem.

There was this problem that we had. And, you

know, we decided to bundle a, a, a free

razor with every yak. And, I mean, I guess

that's one solution, sure. And so, so I've
been

thinking a lot about this lately.

And one of the things that sort of bothers

me is that, you know, we're regularly told
not

to, not to fight the framework, right. But
our

framework pretty actively fights the language.
There are things

that the language is saying, hey, this might
be

crazy. Maybe you don't want to do this. And

we're like, I won't do what you tell me.

I will do exactly what I want to do.

And it encourages this, this kind of module-centric
design.

Limits the entry points that we can have.
So,

you know, Yehuda made a really great point,
actually,

when he talked about that we're kind of on

the 400th story, right. And, and I agree.
We

are, we are like way up here in terms

of abstraction.

But, like, I've heard rumors that, like, maybe,
on

most buildings, like, those other floors like
have people

in them, and like, they do things. And like

maybe you can not just be trapped on the

400th floor forever, but maybe you want to
like

go down, cause like, I heard, like, on floor

350 there's like an ice cream store, and like,

I like ice cream. Right. So maybe I want

to go down and have some ice cream.

But, like, I can't. Because I could only do

things with things that are instantiatable,
right. And if

everything is a module, I'm not instantiating
that. I

guess I could write my own class and include

half of what's going on, but that seems like

I'm just perpetuating the problem.

So, here's another, here's another Rails opinion.
Rails believes

that your conventions suck. First example
is, now, I

know it's gonna be hard for you to believe,

but there were conventions for building applications
before Rails

came out. Like, people were actually building
- I

know, it's a little weird. They were building
web

applications, and, and one of the things that
they

used was JavaScript, right.

Now, love or hate JavaScript, it, it, it's
here

to stay at this point. We, we, we're gonna

be writing it. And so, Rails, once upon a

time - you guys remember this? You remember
this?

Like, let's, so. If this was before your time

with Rails, we had, we had this great idea,

right, which is, JavaScript's a pain to write.
And

let's write Ruby that writes JavaScript instead.
And so

we called that RJS, and you could write these,

there were these methods that if you said
page

dot whatever, it would generate some JavaScript.
And you

could go look at the JavaScript and it was,

you know, about what you would expect generated
JavaScript

to be.

And then we decided, you know, OK, maybe that

was crazy. But we're still not happy with
the

whole state that we have to write JavaScript.
So

we decided to use JavaScript that looks like
Ruby,

right. OK. Great. All right. Fine. I can see

that.

And then, at that point, now, we were at

a point where there's this other convention,
where like,

if you're using jQuery, and many of us are,

like, let's say, let's say that I want to

render, I have decided I'm gonna be on the

straight and narrow, I am going to render
my,

my, my views in Ruby. I want to render

static html that I spit out. But I need

some dynamic parts, and so I'm gonna render
some,

some JavaScript as well that's gonna do some
things,

right. Use jQuery.

This is a pretty standard convention, right.
I mean,

how many of you have this exact code in

your code base somewhere, right. If you're
not raising

your hand, I'm very shocked. So, we thought,
you

know, that's, that's great. It's really cool
to be

able to hook into $(document).ready and do
some stuff.

And so, so Rails said, that's a horrible idea.

You should use Turbolinks. And so now, look,
you

can yank Turbolinks out of your gemfile and
that's

true. You can do that, right. But it's my

opinion that convention should probably not
completely break someone's

expectations if they're doing server-side
rendering, and this is

something that you, you are going to run into

if you're just starting out with Rails. You'll
be

like, well, why isn't this doing? Well, we
don't

fire. We don't fire the doc.

No, there are, there are other gems that will

make this seem like that is not the case.

But the fact of the matter is, it's gonna

bite you. So, so Rails said, you know, we

have opinions about how you should write JavaScript.

Rails has opinions about how you should maintain
data

integrity as well. And so in the Rails world,

this is a typical, typical way to handle some,

some validation of data integrity, right.
Maybe you make

sure that you have a customer, and you need

a unique reference number, and you have a
typo

there.

validates_associates. Validates :associates
and :line_items, right. And you won't

save an order unless its :line_items are valid.
And

that's really interesting to me, because objects,
unfortunately, you

know, they don't really understand their relations
to other

things very well, because those live somewhere
else. They're

in the data store separate, right. And, you
know,

I, I really think that it would be great,

like, if there was some sort of a system

that we could use. So, like, I don't know,

it would be like a system for managing, I

don't know, relational data, maybe? I don't
know.

It would be great if we had one of

those. And it turns out that, like, we do.

And they are, like, super good at understanding
relationships

between data. And they are super good at,
at

validating the data that goes in and out and

ensuring that things are atomic, right, and
that, that

our updates are not gonna run into race conditions

and the like, right?

I mean, and I'm talking about, even the, let's

say, less than civilized versions of databases,
those are,

those are also able, able to do pretty well

at this. Because, Ruby, the Ruby land has
to

cross a process boundary to know any of this

stuff, and that's pretty lossy, really.

So, I don't think it would be fair, you

know, I've griped a lot at this point about

a few of the opinions that I think Rails

has, and I feel like you came here hoping

that I would offer you some solutions, right.
I

want to show you some solutions that I've
found.

These are my solutions. They look pretty nice,
I

think.

Science.

No. So, I've been doing this thing lately,
and

I'm calling it IDD. And that stands for Ignorance-Driven

Development. It's really blissful. And it's
this, this crazy

idea that, like, maybe starting with Rails
g model,

like starting out thinking about your persistence,
is maybe

not the way to go.

If you're thinking about your persistence
for - I

mean, I can tell you, all right. Raise your

hand if you have stopped to consider what
your

database scheme, schema is gonna look like
after you've

typed Rails g model, and you're just kind
of

frozen there, like, crap. Analysis paralysis
sets in, right.

Because, like, migrations are a pain and databases
are,

ew, yuck. We want to do everything in Ruby,

right?

And, and so that's a problem, right, because
I

don't necessarily know what the best way to
store

my data is off the top of my head,

right? I may find that out as I go.

So here's a crazy idea.

Start with Ruby and ignore persistence, off
the bat.

Like, probably that is not your domain. Your
domain

is not to be a CRUD app. Most of

us here, anyway, our domain is not to just

be a CRUD app, right. We have some business

logic.

And after you start with Ruby, then you start

to identify the scary things, right. And this
is

like the part of our domain that we're really

scared we're not gonna be able to implement.
Like,

what is the thing that's gonna be super hairy,

that we're just kind of like, afraid to tackle,

right. And removing the, like, the analysis
paralysis that

can set in when you're trying to figure out

where your, what your data's gonna look like,
while

you're just kind of playing around with, with
an

algorithm, is great, because it gives you
this sort

of power to attack the scary things. You can

do, I know it's crazy to say, some TDD

and attack these scary things.

And it's, the cost of experimentation is a
lot

lower when you're not messing around running
migrations. You're

just running super fast tests. Everything
is really nice.

And you validate that the business logic that
you're

trying to write is going to be sane before

you go any further.

And so, so what that might look like, for

instance, is let's say I have a monster class,

right. I simply give it some teeth and some

claws, right, and it can bite and it can

scratch, and I write my test. And let's just

assume that biting and scratching is a very,
very

difficult thing for a monster to do, right.

And, and so it starts out that way. And

you gradually iterate on the things that you
want

your monster to do, right. And then what you

find out is that, eventually, after having
iterated through

maybe, maybe many, many iterations on what
this class

looks like, what its collaborators might look
like, you

get to a point where you're like, OK. I

know how to make this monster now. I know

how to, how to tackle it, right.

And now is a time for you to admit

persistence. Right, now you start to think,
OK, well,

I've gotta persist this stuff somewhere. I
have some,

some things about this business logic that
are gonna

require me to save some data to the database.

And so you decide, well, what database am
I

gonna use? Or is it gonna be NoSQL or

is it gonna be SQL or is it gonna

be, I don't know, something in memory? Right.

And then from that point, let's just say you

decide, well, now I'm gonna do some ActiveRecord.
And

so you say, all I do is now inherit

from ActiveRecord::Base. The teeth and claws
are no longer

supplied via injection. But instead they come
from relationships

in some way, and we maybe have determined
that

we require that we have teeth and claws.

And then, you guys are gonna think. You notice

there's no methods here, right. Right. No
methods. It's

not doing anything yet, except the ActiveRecord
stuff. You're

gonna think I'm trolling you. But here's what
I've

started to do.

I use modules. Now, the way I see it,

you know, in firefighting there's this thing
called a

back fire, where it's like, OK, so, when they

say, like, fight fire with fire, that's actually
a

thing. And like, I'm like, you know what,
Rails,

if you really wanna burn the whole place down,

that's OK. I got my own little fire going

over here. And it's gonna, it's gonna allow
me

to have some semblance of order. And let me

show you what that looks like. And before
you

think that it won't work, I can only just

say that it has worked for me. Give it

a try. Strangely, I'm not going to prescribe
that

it's gonna be the solution for everyone. I
know

that's kind of the hip thing to do is

to say, like, my solution will work for you.

But it worked for me.

And what it would look like is this. So

I now have behaviors that I expose in modules,

right. These behaviors are specifically intended
to provide one

isolated thing, one isolated capability to
the persisted record,

right. And so in this case, like, here is

the biting module, for instance, right. And
it knows

how to bite. And let's say this is after

we have developed all of our, all of our

stuff in plain Ruby, right, this is what we

landed on for what bite need to, need to

perform, right.

And so once we've done that, we can write

a class, you know, we can actually just test

against the class that limits the API service
that

our behavior interacts with. This was the
goal. Like,

this is why I do this at all, is

because thinking about how I'm gonna interact
with this,

like, essentially infinite API that, that
a lot of,

a lot of Rails provides, particularly ActiveRecord
provides in

this case, is, is too hard for me. Cause

I'm dumb, OK. So, what I need is some

help to help me just be able to see

into the test. This is the part of the

API I care about.

And you may be concerned about this. You may

say, this looks a lot like ActiveSupport::Concern.
I can

understand why you would say that. Let me
show

you why that's not the case. So, earlier we

talked about how ActiveSupport::Concern's
primary goal is to solve

the problem of modules that depend on other
modules

that modify their base class, right.

The intention in this, and that might look
like

this. Like, let's say now there's like a whole

fighting behavior that might bite and might
scratch, we

don't know yet. There may be some probability
associated

with it, that against a particular target
or maybe

more than one target or whatever, and so it

sort of has this dependency, not just on the

API that the class that it's being included
into

has, but also the stuff that's getting included
into

that class already. So it expects bite and
scratch,

which are provided by other two behaviors.
So, that

kind of thing becomes actually painful. That
actually becomes

painful when you're not using ActiveSupport::Concern.

And so, what you actually have here is a

canary in the coal mine, a sentinel animal,
right.

It's, it's something that's telling you, there's
this thing

that's doing more than one kind of thing that's

more complex, right. And it really isn't fully
encapsulated

in the stuff that I've got so far. And

it leads you to understand that maybe there's
another

thing. Like maybe there's an encounter, right,
and it

might include one or more combatants that
select targets

and do one of their actions, right. Either
bite

or scratch. All right.

So, to kind of start to sum things up,

it, we, we, a lot of us work in

the startup world, right. And it's really
frustrating and

surprising to me that we embrace this idea
of

a minimal, minimum viable product in the startup
world,

right. Build the smallest thing that could
possibly work

and then go from there.

I, I kind of feel like in software, the

whole goal, really, is to make as few decisions

as you possibly can in order to make, get

the desired result, right. Every decision
you defer till

later is going to give you some capability
to

be able to react to change, right. So I

would like to see us, both in Rails and

in the software that we write, start off with

fewer opinions. Start off with fewer assumptions.
Make sure

that the floors that we build have a purpose.

One great way to do that is to make

sure that you can instantiate a lot of the

things, right.

If you can instantiate a lot of the things

then they must have a purpose that we can

reason about. We can think about. As opposed
to,

well, they might modify five hundred methods
on another

class. And in general, just be a considerate
software

writer.

Thanks for your time.