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Asked

I'm fluent in RoR. Should I learn a new stack?

I've been coding since the early 2000s. I started coding in ruby on rails in 2013 and never looked back. I still use jquery for all my front-end.

It bugs me that I haven't made the leap to react/vue or the like, but all projects I worked on so far (freelance + side projects), I didn't have a good reason to implement new tech.

Would you learn a new stack just for the sake of learning? I feel unmotivated doing so when building in rails and jquery, which I'm fluent in, is just much faster.

Ran Leonard
@ran

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Wilbert Liu
@wilbertliu

If your goal is learning, it's totally great to learn new thing. Otherwise, I'd just learn whatever is enough.

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100% agree with Wilbert.

I've been developing my products in Ruby on Rails for years and plan on doing so for many more.

I do enjoy learning, but I'd rather learn about building a better business, than a another programming framework. Of course you might have different goals, so do whatever feels right. There's no right or wrong here.

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Frameworks like TailwindCSS and Alpine.js are giving new legs to mature frameworks like RoR, Django, and even newer ones like Laravel. It's not a bad time to be a backend dev who wants to build frontends that aren't 100% JS while using your existing skills.

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Stick with what you know when you want reliability. Want to build products fast? Use the tech stack you are familiar with. Want to improve your tech? Learn new things. Choosing one over the other is very scenario specific. If you use new tech for building something fast, you would be inefficient with time but you will learn. It's a trade-off really.

I kinda hate JavaScript, but I love Vue.js as to how easy it has improved my skill set to do frontend code. So, if I would have stuck with JavaScript, I would have done myself a disservice in the long run :)

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