Five years after our adoption of React on Rails this year has seen the release of Stimulus-Reflex and the refinement and extension of Turbolinks and Stimulus into Hotwire, a welcome, mostly server side alternative. So far we have only explored Frames for faster TTFB but we’re optimistic about wider applications. Also notable this year Rails 6.1 shipped with built in support for ViewComponents, though we are yet to complete our upgrade or move from Ruby 2.7 to 3.0.
At my employer our modular monolith architecture remains unchanged. Interestingly Shopify published a nuanced engineering article concluding “all large architecture changes end up in an incomplete state”. Apart from European PSD2 mandates, a new billing strategy and greater Facebook marketing API integration, our focus has been on improved change logging and auditing, and tidying and extending test data factories, VCR cassettes, interactor, job, request and feature specs. Along the way we refactored offer management, logistics exports, PayPal Express Checkout and fraud detection. For the first time this year no new gem dependencies were introduced, though we forked PayPal’s REST SDK, abandoned by PayPal.
After years answering 160+ ActiveAdmin questions on StackOverflow I reached the top 20 contributor list and earned StackOverflow’s ‘activeadmin’ badge… time to retire, I think.