Hey there,

A very warm (belated) welcome 🤗 to the railsnew.io mailing list! We are thrilled to have you 🙏🏽 ❤️!

Frankly, we didn’t expect this much interest, so we are flabbergasted and delighted at the same time 😯+ 😃!

As it turns out, you proved us wrong, as y’all did sign up! Oh, happy day ☀️!

What’s in it for you?

An essential function of this mailing list is going to be announcing new features. You can certainly use it for this sole purpose: check what’s brewing in railsnew.io-land by reading our bi-monthly-or-so newsletter.

The primary goal, though, is to have a discourse: to hear your thoughts, feature requests, get to know you. Ultimately, we'd love to build a community of Rails enthusiasts/indie makers who care deeply about pumping out awesome web apps!

While we are primarily going to focus on creating new Rails apps (duh), we'd like to go beyond that and hear about broader aspects, like:

• Your story - We love creating, writing about, and using great software. Ultimately though, people are more interesting than code ever could be! So tell us about yourself, your struggles as a developer/maker/human by hitting reply - we are going to read and reply to every email!
• What are your biggest struggles with Rails these days?
• Could a future release of railsnew.io help with any of those?
• What material would help you to become a better dev/maker?
• according to you, how would a fully-finished railsnew.io app look like?

It's only fair if we go first and answer the above questions!

Our story

Our Ruby on Rails journey started in 2006. An angel investor from India approached Trinity with an idea to create a joint startup. Even though our first daughter was only one year young, we said 'yes' immediately.

A crazy rollercoaster ride ensued. We lived among the locals in Calcutta/Bangalore, worked 20 hours on some days, overwhelmed by the vivid colors, irresistible tastes and intense smells that are so unique to India.

We were using Rails 1.0 back then, and got a functional website up and running in 48 hours. We were hooked for life (as creators, Rails enthusiasts, travelers, digital nomads/ex-pats, and non-conformists 😎).

Since then, we have worked on projects of all shapes and sizes, while traveling to 70+ countries, and staying long-term in some of them.

It has been a fantastic journey! We are ready for the next phase: leaving client work behind and creating content/courses/apps as indie makers. It's the first time we are saying this 'publicly,' and honestly, it's scary as fuck! What if we fail? How embarrassing is that going to be? How about … (myriad of best-of-breed imposter syndrome thoughts)).

We'll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯!

Our biggest struggles with Rails these days

The heyday of Rails, when everyone was writing about best practices, are long gone. Rails matured a lot since then - however, the quantity and quality of articles didn't keep up with the pace.

Thus, probably our biggest struggle with Rails these days is: where to find quality material to hone our craft, learn about new methodologies, perspectives, ideas, and meeting enthusiastic people who are still on fire about Rails.

The Stimulus Reflex community is one of those places, but we wish there would be more!

Hopefully, with the buzz around hey.com, and the promised release of the techniques used in there, as well as Ruby 3.0, is going to restore some of the glory of yore 🚀.

How's railsnew.io helping us?

We believe one of Rails's biggest strengths is the rapid prototyping of ideas.

On the macro-level: churning out an MVP for an app idea over a short time span.

On the micro-level: trying out a new framework (like Stimulus or Stimulus Reflex) or playing around with a new feature.

railsnew.io can help with both, by injecting even more upfront convention-over-configuration and reducing decision making:

1. figure out what you need
2. quickly cobble it together visually (more on that later)
3. generate your project and dive in!

Every decision you do not have to make is hugely beneficial in the long-term: you can use those brain cycles to tackle more interesting problems than 'uh, what are the exact steps to set up TailwindCSS?'.

What material would help us to trudge forward?

• Advanced material from developers in-the-trenches. Some recent examples:' Sustainable Rails' by David Bryant Copeland, 'Boring Rails' by Matt Swanson, 'Playbook Thirty-nine' by Nick Haskins
• Controversial ideas from senior devs who tried a multitude of things and found exciting ways that defy the status quo. 'Painless Rails 'by Ivan Nemytchenko is a great example.
• Simple, yet advanced ideas not found in your typical blog post: we enjoyed 'Growing Rails Applications 'in Practice by Henning Koch and Thomas Eisenbarth. Spartan in the best sense of the word!
• Deep dives into various technologies. We are currently researching Stimulus / Stimulus Reflex / CableReady and related technologies.
• Apart from the technology, we are interested in every aspect of indie making, as that's the direction we are heading towards right now. For example, marketing. If you cringe at hearing 'marketing' - we hear you, we've been there too, for long years. If you want to break free from client work, there's no avoiding it, though. And it's not necessarily a dirty word either! You are reading "marketing material" right now, and since you made it to this point, we imagine you do not hate it. 😅

Our (current) vision of a finished railsnew.io

You are probably familiar with Rails starter templates like Jumpstart by Chris Oliver. These batteries-included-firing-on-all-cylinders tools can save you a ton of time - but what if you don't like some of the choices?

railsnew.io to the rescue!

We are hoping to eventually offer all the lego pieces to construct your own template visually, without the need to configure all the bits and pieces - that should happen automatically in the background. You should only mix and match what you need, and generate your custom-tailored app in no time.

There's a limited demo of this at the moment (currently supporting Tailwind, Bootstrap, Stimulus, and Stimulus Reflex). It's working nicely, but there are so many other things that should be available. It's an ambitious challenge!

Once you bricolage your artisanal template, you should be able to save it for future use. From that point on, you should be able to choose a template you generated earlier, and reduce the time to get a new Rails app up and running even further.

There are lots of bug fixes, UI/UX enhancements, and minor features on our todo list. We are also hoping to receive some feedback to make railsnew.io even more awesome!

Fun fact to finish it off: there have been 416 new Rails apps generated with railsnew.io to date. And that's only counting apps that used a Railsbyte (no way to track the rest). Even if we discard a portion of that number (us testing that everything works), we are talking about 100s of apps created with railsnew.io, which is more than we ever hoped for!

Okay, that's enough for today! Now it's your turn - smash that reply button and let us know what do you think!

Until next time,

Mia && Trinity