If you really want a clean slate, I think Elixir & Phoenix is the most promising stack available right now and is worth investing in. Channels, PubSub, Live View, and BEAM clustering can really simplify building interactive web applications. In my experience it has made full-stack engineering much more approachable and manageable for small development teams. The BEAM itself scales well should the need arise and Phoenix does not make many assumptions about what kind of application you are building, so you won't find yourself fighting your framework if your direction changes.
For a more conservative approach, if you are looking to rapidly scale up a team and/or desire a huge ecosystem of packages to use, then I'd say modern Ruby on Rails is the way to go for maximum initial velocity. However, in my experience Ruby on Rails requires a lot of experience and discipline to keep things "on the rails" as you grow your application, and that initial velocity can quickly vanish if you are not careful.
I say this as someone with a good amount of experience with both frameworks.
I'm curious what the author would think of Pop_OS by System 76. I've been using that as my main distro for a couple years now and love it. When paired with one of their machines (I own a Thelio and a Lemur Pro), things are pretty smooth overall.
I don't have it readily available, but I'll dig around and see if I can find what we covered in class. IIRC it was primarily focused on teenagers in the United States.
Back in college I enrolled in a human-computer interaction course as part of a double major I was pursing at the time. A large body of newly-published research at the time, in 2016, was finding statistically significant positive correlations between the use of social media and rates of self-reported depression.
As someone who has struggled with depression their entire life, 2016 was the year I deleted my Facebook account. I have absolutely no regrets doing so and I encourage everyone to consider breaking free.
Congrats to the 1Password team! I've been using the beta for a while now on Pop_OS! and it has been getting better with each update.
I personally don't mind that it uses Electron. The app feels snappy to me and it looks like their engineers are making efforts to optimize the experience.
I've been in the high-end audio world for over ten years now and I gotta say: it's really cool to see Apple finally offering lossless audio! I wonder if this will finally push Spotify and others to offer lossless streaming?
Spatial audio looks... gimmicky? Surround sound recordings have been available to consumers for over fifty years, yet they remain niche. I'm biased though as I've only purchased high-end stereo headphones.
Interesting! I've been experimenting with Gigalixir for a Heroku-ish experience that supports Elixir clustering... I'll have to give Render a look and compare the two.
This has been my experience as well. I left Elixir for a brief stint with Kotlin, a modern OOP language, and it was jarring how many abstractions and incidental complexity I had to wrangle with to be productive and ship well-tested features.
At work I am building a new internal project in Phoenix Live View and the developer experience so far is sublime. The entire Elixir ecosystem is an absolute joy to use. In the early life of an application, you get the incredible productivity of Ruby on Rails, while building on the battle-tested OTP platform that can scale with your business. The language itself combines the best of Erlang, Clojure, and Ruby all under one roof.
Congratulations to the Crystal team! I know many Rubyists who would love to write a language with the runtime benefits of Go, but values and design principles of Ruby. For those looking to get into a young ecosystem, Crystal looks like a great option.
As for other Ruby alternatives, I moved from Ruby to Elixir a few years ago. Immutable data and OTP more than make up for the language's lack of static typing in my mind. There is also Gleam, which I'm watching for now.
One of these days I'll dig into Rust, which fills a similar niche that Crystal would.