Rails 8 Frontend: 10 commandments and 7 deadly sins in 2025

Rewire your React/RailsAPI brain and learn to build a maintainable Rails Frontend!We will analyse some design patterns (10 commandments) and antipatterns (7 deadly sins).You will discover practical solutions to classic frontend problems (modals, sliders, multistep forms, dynamic elements).

Learn how to balance between components, decorators, helpers and partials and other frontend patterns.

Discover the ecosystem of Rails Frontend tools, like component and UI libraries (stimulus-component, stimulus-use, RailsUI, ZestUI, RapidRailsUI, PhlexUI), encapsulation frameworks (phlex, view components), frontend focused gems (Hotwire combobox, cocoon, lookbook)

Discover some practical solutions to classic problems like multistep forms, styled select dropdowns, dynamic forms, responsive tables, nested forms, modals, sliders.

Bio

My name is Yaroslav Shmarov. I like sharing my knowledge and learnings to empower and enable others in their journey.

I have created 5 best-selling top-rated Udemy courses, with over 5000 student enrolments so far. My courses are beginner-friendly code-alongs, where you get to build a complete app from zero.

Also, I created a youtube channel about Ruby on Rails named SupeRails with over 150 screencasts. In my videos I try to explain concepts in minutes, that otherwise would have taken days or weeks to learn.

I also write a “dev log” blog, where I document the most interesting, most challenging daily programming challenges I overcome at work. I think that writing a “dev log” and documenting learnings helps with structuring knowledge. It helped me become 10x dev vs who I was.

When Hotwire was released, I was working at a startup that used Rails, GraphQL and React. We were early adopters of Hotwire, and we completely rewrote our application into a Rails monolith with server-side rendering with Hotwire and ViewComponent for the design system. The frontend had a lot of complex UI interactions that were previously done with React, and I had the opportunity to solve complex problems with Hotwire, Kredis, ViewComponent, StimulusJS, RequestJS. Since then I have worked as a “Frontend owner” with different companies, where my role was to create complex UI’s with Hotwire. While working with the technology, I had identified multiple common-use patterns and best practices, that I can talk about.

By the way, I never got a CS degree. I got a degree in marketing, but switched to programming. I am self-taught. Initially I tried out Ruby on Rails, because I needed a “School Management web app” for my business. I could not find a good one on the market, so I decided to build one. With no prior experience, Rails was very fast to learn. I was amazed by scaffolds, associations, devise and Heroku - it’s all I really needed to worry about when building my app! That’s what I call Rails magic - being able to jump in and build something that provides business value with minimal experience!