You might have read the infamous blog posts titled “Rails is Dead”, but I have seen development teams flounder over and over again when they try and reinvent the wheel using NodeJS on the backend.

The “greenfield” project is known by developers as a productivity Nirvana. It is a beautiful place where there is no legacy, no bugs and endless possibilities. It is also littered with mines.

I’ve recently seen a number of anti-patterns around the creation and early growth new projects, and thought I’d summarize the anti-patterns I’d seen in the past as a guide for developers to avoid these common pitfalls.

The Ruby on Rails framework often gets a lot of hate over the years.

Rails makes it easy to get up and running quickly. Unfortunately, its beginner-friendly approach leaves you high and dry months later when you have thousands of lines of code.

Rails applications of this type are often referred to as Rails monoliths.

One of the best ways to refactor and save an aging Rails monolith, is to extract service objects.

In these videos we create a “base service” which allows us to easily build service objects with powerful error handling and chaining capabilities.