Let's Standardize Rails, Once and For All!

The video titled "Let's Standardize Rails, Once and For All!" features Justin Searls and Meagan Waller discussing the evolution of the Standard gem, a Ruby linting and formatting tool that helps maintain consistency across Ruby projects. The session, held at RailsConf 2023, is centered around creating a new gem called standard-rails, which aims to establish a set of RuboCop rules tailored for Rails applications. Here are the key points discussed throughout the event:

Introduction of Standard: Justin explains how he created the Standard gem in 2018 to eliminate arguments over RuboCop configurations that many development teams were experiencing. The goal was to lock down configurations, allowing developers to focus on building rather than debating stylistic preferences.
Community Involvement: Unlike previous iterations, Justin emphasizes that the new standard-rails will rely on community input through a straw poll model at RailsConf. This democratic approach intends to gather collective insights on RuboCop rules and enhance consistency across various Rails applications.
Voting Process: Attendees are engaged in a hands-on voting process using paddles to express their consensus on different proposed rules. The session involves lively debates about the advantages and drawbacks of specific linting rules, highlighting the importance of moderation in tool configurations to avoid friction when writing code.
Examples of Specific Rules: The discussion includes various proposed rules such as:
- Active Support Aliases: Debate on whether to prevent the use of Rails' Active Support methods in favor of core Ruby methods.
- Timestamps in Migrations: Consideration of requiring timestamp fields in database tables.
- Environment Variable Access: Discussion on whether to enforce the usage of Rails’ application secrets rather than raw environment variables.
Conclusions and Takeaways:
- The session concludes with a lighter mood, emphasizing collaboration and community input in shaping the future of Rails linting rules. The presenters highlight that participants are encouraged to continue engaging in feedback and discussions regarding standard-rails, promising an initial release incorporating community-selected rules soon after the conference. Justin hits on the importance of reducing friction among developers while maintaining coding standards that adapt to various Rails projects.

Let's Standardize Rails, Once and For All!
Justin Searls and Meagan Waller • July 10, 2023 • Atlanta, GA

Four years ago, I arbitrarily configured every RuboCop rule and published it as a gem called "standard". 135 releases later, feedback from the community has gradually transformed Standard into a linter & formatter ruleset that most Rubyists can get behind. Today, Standard is delivering on its promise: helping teams stay focused on their work instead of arguing over syntax.

The time has come to once again configure the unconfigurable by creating a standard-rails based on rubocop-rails. But this time, we'll skip the years of debating rules on GitHub. Instead, we're holding a community straw poll at RailsConf!

Join us for a town hall-style event where we'll review what each rubocop-rails rule does, hear its pros and cons, and put it to a vote. We'll enshrine the consensus picks in the first public release of standard-rails. By showing up, you'll not only be establishing conventions to promote safe and consistent code, you'll be sharpening the focus of Rails developers around the world!

RailsConf 2023