Before there was GitHub, there was Err the Blog. Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett wrote one of the essential Rails blogs of early Rails era. Therein, many of the idioms and ideas we use to build Rails apps today were documented or born.

I’d figured this site was offline, as are most things from the mid-2000s. ‘Lo and behold, it’s still online in its pink-and-black glory. Lots of nostalgia on my part here.

There was a Big Moment here, in my career and Ruby/Rails, where an abnormal density of smart people were together in a moment (if not a community) and the basis of my career took shape. It was good times, even if we didn’t yet have smartphones or doom-scrolling.

Allow me to reflect on what I found as I went through the archives.

How we built things back then

Rails circa 2.x was a quite unfamiliar game to the modern developer. REST conventions for CRUD controllers had just taken hold, and were not yet the canonical way to structure Rails code. There was a lot of experimentation and many of the solutions we take for granted today (namely, dependencies) were extremely unsolved back then.

DRY Your Controllers — err.the_blog – ideas about CRUD controllers before CRUD controllers were the thing in Rails (2.0 I think?). That said, if you were to write this now… I'd have issues with that. 😆

My Rails Toolbox — err.the_blog – this probably represented the state of the art for building Rails in its time… 17 years ago. 👴

Vendor Everything — err.the_blog – I followed this approach on my first Rails app. It was a pretty good way to keep things going for one, enthusiastic developer at the time. But RubyGems, Bundler, etc. are far better than vendor’ing these days. And, one of the crucial leverage points for working in the Rails space.

How we built things back now

Some things stay the same. For example, the need to fill in the gaps between Rails’ conventions for organizing your app, enhancing Ruby via ActiveSupport, and the lack of a suitable approach to view templates that satisfies writing code, testing code, and building front-ends.

Organize Your Models — err.the_blog – early memories of attempting to organize files in a Rails 1.2 app despite numerous headwinds presented by Rails itself. (IMO, organizing a Rails app by folder+namespace has really only started to work after Rails 6.0).

Rails Rubyisms Advent — err.the_blog – a love letter to ActiveSupport's extensions to the Ruby language. Many of these are in the Ruby language now, thankfully! ActiveSupport (still) rubs some folks the wrong way, but it remains one of my favorite things about Rails.

View Testing 2.0 — err.the_blog – amazingly, there's still no good story here. It's all shell games; write e2e tests instead of unit tests, use object-like intermediaries instead of ERB templates, etc.

How we stopped building things that way

Rails has always had flawed ideas that need re-shaping or removing over time. Mostly in making ActiveRecord as good of an ecosystem participant as it is a query-generation API.

with_scope with scope — err.the_blog – ActiveRecord scopes are way better now! I think with_scope remains, at least in spirit, in the Rails router API.

ActiveRecord Variance — err.the_blog – wherein our heroes discover inconsistencies in AR's find* APIs and patch their way to more predictable operation thereof.

How I was even more excited about Ruby

Err the Blog was not first on the Rails hype wave of the mid-2000’s. But, it was consistently one of the best. Every time a new post was published, I knew it was worthwhile to make time to read the latest post. I learned a lot about my favorite things about Ruby from Err: writing little languages and Enumerable.

Pennin' a DSL — err.the_blog – I could not read enough posts on building DSLs in my early Ruby days. It was the feature I was excited about in Ruby. Thankfully, it's a lot easier to do 'macro magic' in Ruby these days. And, hooking into the idiomatic ways to write Rails-style declarative bits is much better now.

Select a Reject — err.the_blog, Allow Me to Inject — err.the_blog – love letters to Enumerable, my favorite thing about Ruby. And Full of Ambition — err.the_blog – fan fiction about Enumerable and ActiveRecord finally uniting in a loving relationship.

We have to go back

If you liked this, you may also enjoy revisiting:

  • has_many :through – Josh Susser’s blog was one of the first to explain how Rails works and how to leverage it
  • Red Handed – _why the lucky stiff’s blog
  • Envy Labs – a Rails blog from the Rails Envy folks, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer
  • Caboose – part community, part collective, an early nexus of Rails talent

And so, I come to the end of my nostalgia. Now, I must go forward.