Why Stick with Ruby on Rails at GitLab
Summary
Sid Sijbrandij, Gitlab CEO, talks about their rationale for choosing ruby on rails and a monolith based architecture.
Thoughts
The motivation came from a background of writing web applications using java and PHP. Java frameworks enforced structured web apps but had too much overhead whereas PHP frameworks were very approachable but quickly lost coherence as the application grew.
When ruby on rails came along - this was the status quo. You had one or the other but never both. Ruby on rails, according to Sid, represented having the best of both worlds - being both structured and easy to approach.
When I think of note-taking, the same dichotomy exists. Structure, like hierarchies, helps with organization but takes effort to adopt and maintain. Free form writing is much more approachable but you quickly lose track of what you have. What if we had something that did both? What if we had flexible hierarchies?
Now taking this analogy one step further, Sid also talks about the monolith being a good fit for GitLab and that it, and many applications, are not served well by a micro-service-based architecture. While this might still be premature for us to think about for note-taking - what is the equivalent of micro-services when it comes to knowledge management?