Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results
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2022Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results
2,660 members of the Ruby on Rails community from 102 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2022.
Some of these questions have been asked since our original survey over a decade ago, and show how the community has evolved over the last twelve years. Others are first-time questions included to capture the current state our ecosystem.
Demographics
Who are the developers that took the 2022 Ruby on Rails Community Survey? Here's where they live, how long they've been working in Rails, and more about the survey's participants.
Total Participants
2,660 Rails developers participated in this year's Ruby on Rails Community Survey, which is an increase of ~23% from 2020.
Participant Location
Rails developers participated in this survey from all over the world! We had developers from 102 countries across 6 continents participate (unfortunately, no Rails developers from Antarctica were involved).
Other countries:
Which one of the following applies to you?
How many years have you been developing with Rails?
How many Rails applications have you contributed to?
How did you learn to code?
Other responses:
Community Insight
Like many people, I spent a long time debating what would be the best way to get into a career in software development. I chose a bootcamp for the structured setting and accelerated timeline, especially since I would be leaving my job to transition careers. I went to a program that had an emphasis on pair programming as well as a “hands on keyboard” approach. The most valuable aspect of my bootcamp was that on completion I was matched with a company as an intern. I started a 5 week internship at Planet Argon shortly after completing my program and it was one of the best learning experiences of my life. Having the opportunity to work on real world projects with an amazing team of supportive people allowed me to solidify what I’d learned in my 20 week intensive program.
I’m glad to see an increase in the number of respondents who attended a bootcamp, and I think this will continue to rise as more people share their experiences. I think bootcamps are a great way to dive into development and get experience with the “learn how to learn” model that equips students with the skills they need to self teach and grow their skills and knowledge effectively on their own. Having been through the bootcamp experience I would definitely do it again. No matter which route you choose, I think the best way to learn is to just get started - build projects, write code, keep challenging yourself, and the rest will fall into place as you go.
Frank Proulx
Frank is a developer who enjoys working on Rails apps and hiking Portland’s many forest trails.
Teams & Responsibilties
Developers from all different working backgrounds completed this survey. Here's more information about the development teams, responsibilities, and types of applications that Rails developers are building.
What are your responsibilities in the stack?
How many Rails applications is your team currently responsible for?
How big is the development team for your primary Rails applications?
Do you and/or your team typically work remotely?
Community Insight
In early 2020, allowing remote work was a substantial differentiator for employers. A little more than two years later, it's become the way nearly all of us work.
Ben Orenstein
Ben is the co-founder of Tuple and co-host of the Art of Product.
Who uses your application/s?
Has your development team grown or shrunk in the last two years?
Ruby & Rails Version Updates
How up to date is your app? Are you running the latest version of Ruby? Rails? What strategy do you use for upgrades? Is your boss on board with spending time on upgrades? See the answers to all of your Ruby on Rails version-related questions in this section.
Of the Rails applications you work on, how many are updated to the most recent (Rails/Ruby) releases?
If not all, why not?
Other responses:
Community Insight
This survey has validated something I’ve only been able to speculate as an engineer, and that’s that companies are considerably behind in their rails upgrades- largely due to the difficulty in major version jumps. It’s clear that incompatible dependencies, unreliable tests, and a lack of time and strategy are a large part of this issue. For example, when it comes to dual-booting, we’ve seen clients use this technique, but not to its highest potential. We believe everybody should embrace dual-booting as a best practice to upgrade and stay up to date.
Ariel Juodziukynas
Staff Engineer at FastRuby.io, Ruby On Rails dev from Buenos Aires. Passionate about programming, open source, games and music. Tolkien fan. Spends a lot of time spelling his last name.
How long has your Ruby on Rails application been in development?
Is your team using a dual-boot strategy for upgrades?
If not -- what are some barriers for you?
Which Ruby version manager are you using?
Other responses:
Community Insight
The rise of asdf shows the increasing prevalence of working in multiple languages on a regular basis. Developers don’t want to be a version manager manager, and having one tool to consistently manage your environment across all your applications and languages is a nicer experience. For those who primarily work in Ruby, the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well” still applies. RVM is a mature tool that works well, but features like gemsets are no longer necessary in the modern Ruby ecosystem, and standard interfaces like .ruby-version files make it easy to move between version managers and find the one that works best for you.
Matt Duszynski
Matt is an Engineering manager at @nexhealthHQ, building the future of healthcare and a world-class engineering team.
What versions of Rails are you using in your applications?
What versions of Ruby are you using in your applications?
Other responses:
Configuration
Though microservices had been a hot topic of conversation in the community in past years, monoliths continue to be the most common type of Rails application being built and maintained.
In the configuration realm, Sidekiq continues to dominate as the most common Active Job adapter. In this section, you'll also find stats about other third-party integrations with Rails.
Which Active Job adapters do you use to process background jobs?
Other responses:
What third-party email services do your Rails integrate with?
Other responses:
You are primarily building (monoliths or microservices)
Community Insight
Over the past four years, the share of survey respondents building microservices has (very) slightly declined, but the most interesting shift here is the movement from hybrid applications to monoliths. Teams seem to be deciding that hybrid environments offer a poor compromise between the respective benefits of monoliths or microservices. Years later, Rails continues to be a strong choice for building monoliths.
Geoff Harcourt
Geoff Harcourt is the CTO at CommonLit, a non-profit that delivers a high-quality literacy curriculum in English and Spanish to students in need and their teachers.
Legacy vs. Greenfield
As Rails continues to exist as a 16 year old framework, there are many legacy applications that have been worked on for years. But as new companies choose a framework for their web applications, a healthy amount of greenfield apps continue to be built with Rails.
The data shows more than half of Rails developers have deployed a greenfield Rails app in the last two years, and more than half are working on mostly new instead of legacy applications.
How many of your apps are legacy apps, or code inherited from other developers?
How many greenfield Rails apps have you deployed since 2018?
Learning
Here's how Rails developers continue to learn – where they consume content about Ruby on Rails and connect with their community.
It may come as no surprise, but we see a 10% drop in participation in local Ruby/Rails groups, which might be directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We see a 3% drop in online communities, too. Less people are attending conferences, too.
We're also sharing some of the most popular technical podcasts, technical blogs, and live coding streams from our community.
Have you been to a conference (regional or bigger) for Ruby and/or Rails in the last year?
Do you participate in local in-person user groups related to Ruby/Rails development?
Do you participate in online user groups related to Ruby/Rails development?
What are some technical podcasts that you enjoy listening to?
Top 10
Other mentions:
Community Insight
2021 was a defining year for The Ruby on Rails Podcast. We went independent, brought on Mirror Placement as a partner, added three co-hosts (Jemma, Brian and Nick) and of course, hired our wonderful editor, Paul Bahr. Even better, cross over episodes with other shows and panel recordings were the perfect reminder that community content was a collaboration. I continue to be grateful for every listener we have.
Brittany Martin
Engineering Manager at TextUs and Co-Host of The Ruby on Rails Podcast
Gems & Open Source
The open source world – and the delightful Rails community – are key components of the long-term success of the framework. Here's how the community is involved in open source, along with insight into the gems Rails developers love and hate. These are always fan favorite questions every year.
The data shows opportunity for more developers to contribute back to open source, but prioritizing that when also juggling product or client work is a big challenge for many developers.
Have you authored at least one gem?
How often do you contribute back to open source projects?
Which Ruby gems do you love?
When you look at the gems on this list and the following list of gems that are the most frustrating, you'll see some significant overlap. Devise, nokogiri, rspec, and rails are some of the most helpful gems for developers, but aren't without their respective challenges as well.
Top 10
Other mentions:
JavaScript + Rails
Rails continues to be more deeply intertwined with JavaScript – a frequent topic of discussion in the community. In this section, we got a few colorful replies that didn't hide their true feelings about JavaScript. Nonetheless, it's undeniable that JavaScript + Rails are being used together more than ever.
Here is some insight into what JavaScript libraries and testing frameworks are being used in tandem with Rails.
What JavaScript libraries are you using alongside Rails?
Other responses:
For greenfield Rails projects, what are you using to manage JavaScript libraries?
Other responses:
What JavaScript testing frameworks are you using to write tests?
Other responses:
Community Insight
Folks are opinionated about their tech stacks, and there's been lots of rumbling about Stimulus and Hotwire. So! It's interesting that React is far and away the favorite front-end ecosystem to pair with Ruby on Rails projects. It's a bit of an extrapolation, but the heavy usage of Jest and Yarn points in that direction.
Jeremiah Stanley
Jeremiah is a UX/UI designer, novice animator, branding consultant, and software engineer at TextUs.
What Javascript package manager do you use?
Testing & Code Quality
Code quality and testing is always a lively source of conversation in the Rails community. The results here from these questions are historically widely varied, enlightening, and subject to discussion. Here are the favorite code quality tools, testing frameworks, and testing goals from our survey participants.
What code quality tools do you use?
What Rails testing frameworks are you using to write tests?
What is your go-to Ruby debugger tool?
Community Insight
I’m very happy to see debugging tools have been added to the community survey. As the Ruby community starts focusing on tooling more, it’s important to see what’s inside developers’ tool belts.
I’m also excited to see Ruby Debug already has 10% of the votes just months after its 1.0 release. Any great developer tool relies on many factors to succeed, including feature completeness, stability, education materials, documentation, …etc. So there is still a large room for improvement for Ruby Debug to gain more mindshare.
As a major contributor to the project, I’m confident that it will continue to enhance Ruby developer productivity in more ways. So I hope we can see it continue to gain popularity in the future surveys.
Stan Lo
Stan Lo is a senior developer at Shopify. He and his teammates at the Ruby Developer Experience Team are dedicated to helping Ruby developers feel happy and productive. He’s from Taiwan but currently lives in London; and discovering pubs has become his new hobby. You can connect with Stan on Twitter and GitHub.
What code to test/spec ratio does your team aim for?
Other responses:
...and what is your ACTUAL code-to-test ratio? 😜
What code quality tools do you use?
Which Error tracking tools do you use in production?
Other responses:
Community Insight
The team and I are excited to see Sentry rising to the top of the leaderboard in error reporting. At Sentry's core, we care about every developer and openness. We always aim to listen to users and develop things in public. Together with domain experts, we try to provide an SDK and product that is easy to use and provides immediate value out of the box. Looking at our Ruby SDK alone, after all these years and thousands of commits from nearly 100 different contributors, it is beyond rewarding to see this feedback from Ruby developers!
That being said, this is OUR success, for Sentry and the OS Ruby community together. Please stay connected with us on Github, we are grateful for any input/feedback.
Daniel Griesser
Daniel is a Senior Engineering Manager at Sentry working in Vienna. He is responsible for large parts of the Platform and Infrastructure Teams at Sentry. He has 15 years of experience working in IT, started as a Web developer, and later transitioned into a mobile developer. When he joined Sentry 5 years ago, he worked on many different SDKs ranging from iOS, React Native, Ruby, PHP and Javascript. In his free time, he still enjoys playing video games and describes himself as a hardcore casual gamer. You can reach out to him on Twitter or Github
Which performance monitoring tools do you use in production?
Other responses:
Community Insight
As one of the maintainers of newrelic_rpm , the gem that connects apps to New Relic, I'm thrilled to see so many respondents trusting our company to monitor their applications.
New Relic made one of its first big marketing announcements at RailsConf in 2008. ("rpm" in the gem's name stands for "rails performance monitoring"!) We're committed to supporting the Ruby community and would love any feedback to make our product stronger on our open source GitHub repo.
I'm surprised to not see OpenTelemetry for Ruby on this list, a newer open source effort to make the way we collect performance data platform agnostic. Many performance monitoring companies believe this will be the future of telemetry data collection. The Ruby project only has stable tracing, but may have metrics and logging available the next time this survey rolls around.
Kayla Reopelle
Kayla is a Senior Software Engineer on the Open Source Ruby Agent team at New Relic and a Planet Argon alumni.
Are you using an automated security tool like bundler-audit?
Deployment & DevOps
How often does your team push to production? What automation tools are you using? 2022 showed a continued uptick in deployment frequency (daily or multiple times per day) and, in tandem, an increase in developers utilizing continuous deployment via CI.
Github continued to dominate as the most common source code host amongst Rails developers (and the quick rise of Github Actions).
Here's the full data about deployments and DevOps in Rails.
How often do you deploy releases of your Rails applications to production?
Other responses:
Which automated deployment tools do you use?
Where is your source code hosted?
What CDN(s) do you use?
Other responses:
If you have deployed applications using other languages/frameworks, would you say that it has been easier or harder to deploy Rails applications?
Databases
We've tracked database data (how meta) since the earliest iteration of the Rails survey back in 2009. Here's the full scope of which databases Rails developers are using – and which they would prefer to use.
Which databases do you typically use in production?
Which database would you prefer to use in production?
Which nosql databases do you use?
Other responses:
OS, Editors & Servers
We're talking servers, operating system preference, editors, and more. In 2022, macOS still dominates Rails developers, Visual Studio Code leads the pack in editor preference, and more Continuous Integration options than ever before.
Which operating system do you primarily develop your applications on?
What is your preferred editor?
What are you using for containerization?
Other responses:
Which web servers do you use in production?
Which Rails Servers are you using in production?
Community Insight
Wow y’all! It fills me with pride to see how much people depend on puma and use it everyday. While it’s a mere brick at the bottom of many apps, the maintainers and community are the heroes, keeping it running happily and smoothly all these years.
Evan Phoenix
Evan Phoenix has been a Ruby developer since 2003. He’s worked on a variety of projects such as puma, benchmark-ips, and many others.
Which Continuous Integration (CI) servers do you use?
Other responses:
The Future of Rails
Rails is quickly approaching its 18th birthday, and it continues to mature and evolve as a framework. We asked developers for their thoughts on the future of Rails – where the framework is headed, if they still recommend it, and more.
I feel the Rails core team is shepherding the project in the right direction.
Rails is still relevant in 2022
I feel confident security vulnerabilities are being addressed in new Rails releases
Is Rails your server-side framework of choice?
Would you recommend new developers learn and build Rails applications in 2022?
Community Insight
While I don't deny there is likely an inherent bias within the community of those who participated in the survey, seeing that 94% recommend that new developers learn and build Rails apps vs other frameworks is really encouraging. I can't help but attribute this to a healthy (and stable) third-party library community, a lot of valuable educational material, and ability for junior developers to be able to quickly learn how to contribute.
Robby Russell
Robby (on Rails) is the creator of Oh My Zsh, host of the Maintainable Software Podcast, and CEO of Planet Argon, a software consultancy that improves existing Ruby on Rails applications and makes them more maintainable.
What are a few things you'd like to see happen in the Ruby on Rails community?
Some kind of convention for deploying Rails apps. Everywhere I've worked has a reasonably similar Rails app but a wildly different deploy process.
More podcasts with new angles, a lot of them feel like variants of the same theme.
ViewComponents integrated into Rails.
A renewed focus on helping junior devs get started and grow in the Ruby/Rails world.
Focus on new people learning Ruby again. Possibly a podcast the revitalizes some of the Railscasts
Have some sort of mentoring program for Juniors, to grow the community.
More content to help experienced engineers write better OOP code as rails has a mentality of "chuck it in a service object.
I feel like pandemic stress is still hitting my chosen dev meetups and groups hard; we're still figuring out ways to connect and collaborate during 2022 that don't feel exhausting.
More visibility into roadmap.
More "15 Minute Blog" type examples. Examples showing how/why Rails is better than the competition. Side by side code examples times that show how much faster you can develop with Rails.
More pride, I think! The narrative has been “Rails’ slow descent into obsolescence” but there really is nothing else like it out there. Wear the batteries-included and serverside stripes unapologetically and get out there and say it: it’s better than the alternative.
In Conclusion
While Rails is no longer the new kid on the block, it's proven to be a reliable framework that can scale up with large companies (Procore, Shopify, GitHub) while still being agile and reliable enough to be chosen by organizations in 2022.
We’re encouraged that the majority of developers who are using the framework still recommend building applications with it.
We also have read through several comments from respondants that make it clear that the leadership of the Rails project is impacting their confidence in the future success and growth of the community.
At Planet Argon, we continue to believe that Ruby on Rails is a wonderful technology choice to stay invested in and hope to help grow the community in the coming years.
Again, we appreciate every single Rails developer that took the time to complete our survey – we hope to see you next time for a recap of the next two years of working with Rails.
About Planet Argon
Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Planet Argon's team of developers specializes in making existing Ruby on Rails applications better and more maintainable. We partner with companies to perform code audits and Rails upgrades, provide ongoing Ruby on Rails support and maintenance, consulting, and more.
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