Maintaining a Ruby on Rails App

I’ve used a few different kinds of languages and frameworks. Adding new features to a Ruby on Rails application has been really easy. In fact, sitting down to glance at code to add a field on the back end when I haven’t looked at the code in over a month, I’m typically done within… minutes. Maybe like 10 to 25 minutes.

For example, within the job site fields, I didn’t have the Resume format select, GitHub field check box, or project site field checkbox. Yet adding those handful of fields into the database was a piece of cake. Again, later when I needed to add the technology stack field, and way later the interview date fields and… each of these were mere minutes on the back end. Adding these new fields on the front end was something I was really used to.

class AddResumeFormatToJobSites < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    add_column :job_sites, :resume_format, :string
    add_column :job_sites, :github_field, :boolean
    add_column :job_sites, :project_site_field, :boolean
  end
end

private
def job_postings_params
        params.require(:job_posting).permit(:posting_title, :company_name, :posting_url,  :posting_status, :posting_location_city, :posting_location_type, :employment_type, :posting_id, :pay_range, :applied_at, :rejected_at, :interviewed_at, :archive, :technology_stack, :posting_comments)
    end

Then in May 2024, as I started getting lots of emails from recruiters, some of them started appearing to be duplicates of each other! It was time that I started tracking those, too… it was incredibly easy to leverage what I did before with the Job Postings and Job Sites, but simpler, since I didn’t need a relational table. That refactoring took me maybe… 4 hours to be generous!

Mid August 2024, I needed to add yet another report to easily compare data against Pathrise reports and… that extra Report was just too much for the menus. So, I spent some time putting all the reports into one drop-down menu using Bootstrap. I think I spent more time playing with Bootstrap getting the drop menu to render correctly than it took me to put together the extra report itself!

Overall, I’m still thoroughly impressed with the ease of use with Ruby on Rails. These last few months, I’ve seen fewer jobs looking for this skill than I did last fall.