Rails, Svelte, and Fundamentals

When we build software here at LokBros Studio, we choose tools that make us happy.

Happy developers write happy code, which creates happy customers, who happily serve people of their own.

That’s why we love Ruby on Rails

In 2025, the Rails ecosystem still feels like an underrated space for the those intersecting business and technology. It feels like it sits between low-code and some of the “code-heavier” stacks — even ones that are touted to be beginner-friendly like NextJS. In fact, some say Rails is better low-code than low-code itself.

Rails doesn’t try to obstruct web fundamentals. Rails balances expressive code with the ability to interrogate objects up and down the call chain. And Ruby’s a wonderful language. Of course, I’m biased towards dynamically typed, object-oriented languages (for now). But I was glad to see how quickly Kaamil picked Rails and Hotwire up.

He has a more traditional background as far as programming languages go. C# (from his Unity development days), JavaScript, and C were probably the ones he used most frequently. But he’s seemed to adjust to Ruby — and while Rails magic throws him off every now and then (as it does to me), he sees the vision of the majestic monolith.

Still, while this sounds like a love letter to Rails, it’s not always the best tool out there.

So we use Svelte

Hotwire, the default set of tools to write dynamic frontends in Rails code doesn’t always provide the same spunk that JS frameworks do. For that, Kaamil’s turned me on to Svelte — and I’ve loved working with it. What a refreshing change from React!

Svelte, like Rails (and the Ruby ecosystem more generally), sticks to web fundamentals closely. It provides enough utility to be powerful while staying easy to read and configure.

Svelte is our go-to for websites, especially when we need interactive bits. We’ll even rope it into Rails with InertiaJS when we need it.

The overall point here isn’t that Rails or Svelte is the best and you should use them and nothing else. It’s that we are happier with tools that prioritize fundamental concepts — ones that we can learn more deeply as we keep developing with them.

We might not use Rails or Svelte forever — but we’ll always prioritize frameworks that keep happiness and fundamental concepts at the center of their ethos.

Until next time,
Saalik