Rails, how developers grow, and what's wrong with it

Rails is a great tool for automating the heck out of pumping out a quick and dirty site in short order.

It's a terrible tool for learning. The community isn't like the IRC communities I've been involved in. It's catering for a lot of developers early in their journey.

This is what I see on /r/rails or hacker news or being actively practised far too often:

• I just discovered service objects
• Test Driven Development/Unit Tests are dead, because it's too hard to stub out ActiveRecord.
• Uh, guys, I started using after_save hooks and now my persistence layer is working with Sidekiq and the Mail server to kill all humans.
• DHH said something outrageous! 60% of us are rushing to take his word as gospel right now; cause like, uh, nuts to the status quo!
• Oh neat I discovered modules, and that classes are objects, so... like, I'm not going try to do evil... but... here's a gem I wrote that adds a search to all of the defined classes, because it's not like that could cause conflicts; right?

and it makes me cranky. It's actively harmful for people who don't have seasoned peers near them, ready to slide over a polite link on SOLID; or talk to you about the Principle of least astonishment.

Surely we can do better.

Where are the articles on

• If you are testing your active record instances, that's not a unit test. Go extract your domain models and test those please.
• Here's 10 terrible ways to write a component/gem/etc; because it's the people using your code that have to put up with your mistakes when your github repo becomes abandonware.
• How to open up a github project to collaborators when you don't have the time to maintain your code anymore.
• How to write a decent readme that sums up your gem/repo/etc.
• What is Single Responsibility Principle? How does it apply within the context of ActiveRecord, Controllers and triggering after-create/after-save events?
• Why are we OK to use FactoryGirl for tests (obviously useful), but much less willing to use the Factory Pattern to assemble our object graph; when convention breaks down in the face of complexity?
• KISS: Why it's often worth writing code you might feel is imperfect if it helps your team collectively understand what the heck you are doing.
• Why version control systems have a blame feature, and the startling reality the next guy looking after your system can track you down and beat you to death with your own severed legs.
• Stop reading the ember.js documentation now, and just go look at the source code, it'll save us  all a load of time.
• Magic is generally bad unless you are all wizards; but like Lord of the Rings it's freakin' easy for one or more of you to turn evil.

Interestingly, many these are framework and language agnostic - in my experience though, many framework centric types tend to only know their framework and community; so it distorts their understandings. 

It's not their fault - otherwise smart people have set out to solve a number of problems, then tried to generalise them having already learnt a significant amount of things the hard way - they just keep forgetting to share their learnings.

The best resources I had when I was learning was a mix of IRC (there is nothing like asking a stupid question and realising you just did so infront of the guy who invented the web, or the language you are using right now), and wikis like Portland Pattern Repository.