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Ten years of Rails upgrades by Jordan Raine Upgrading Rails can go from easy-to-hard quickly. If you've struggled to upgrade to a new version of Rails, you're not alone. And yet, with useful deprecation warnings and extensive beta periods, Rails has never made it easier to upgrade. So what makes it hard? By looking at the past ten years of Rails upgrades at Clio (and other notable apps), let's see what we can learn. Gain insight into the tradeoffs between different timelines and approaches and learn practical ways to keep your app up-to-date.
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The video titled "Ten years of Rails upgrades" is presented by Jordan Raine at RailsConf 2018, focusing on the evolution and challenges of upgrading Ruby on Rails over a decade. Raine, a Ruby developer at Clio, shares insights from personal experience of upgrading various versions of Rails, highlighting both improvements and ongoing difficulties in the upgrade process. Key points discussed throughout the video include: - **The Evolution of Rails Upgrades**: Raine notes that with each version, Rails has improved its upgrade path through better deprecation warnings and extended beta testing periods, making it theoretically easier to upgrade. - **Real-World Experiences**: He contrasts the experiences of a small startup and a larger company during their Rails upgrades, emphasizing that while the steps taken (upgrading gems, changing code, testing, deploying) are similar, the scale and resulting challenges can differ greatly based on the company’s size and code complexity. - **Technical Debt and Maintenance**: One critical issue Raine emphasizes is the accumulation of technical debt during the long gaps between upgrades, which complicates future upgrades. He illustrates this with anecdotes about outdated gems and deprecated methods proliferating across an aging codebase, raising concerns about dependency management. - **Strategies for Overcoming Challenges**: Raine suggests practical strategies to facilitate smoother upgrades, including: - Keeping the gem file healthy by avoiding version constraints and eliminating forks. - Actively addressing deprecations rather than deferring them until future upgrades are required. - Implementing a systematic approach to "dual boot" the application in the next Rails version to catch issues early. - **Cultural Shift in Upgrades**: He emphasizes fostering a culture where regular gem updates and gradual upgrades become part of the development process, translating the upgrade effort from isolated events to continuous work. Raine concludes with optimistic reflections on the agility gained from applying these principles. He reinforces that by continually addressing dependencies, promoting teamwork in upgrades, and engaging with the Rails community, future upgrades can be less daunting and more integrated into the development workflow. The main takeaways from Raine's talk focus on the need to recognize the importance of managing dependencies, embracing a culture of regular updates, and realizing that upgrades can be a collaborative effort across the entire development team rather than the responsibility of a few individuals. By shifting mindset and practices, companies can better prepare for Rails upgrades and improve codebase quality over time.
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