Most Common Types of Technical Debt in Rails

The majority of the Rails custom software development work we do here at NextLink Labs deals with rehabilitating older projects that are overwhelmed with technical debt from years of development without refactoring.The software problems in these websites are never introduced maliciously. Instead, these problems tend to build up gradually over months and years after many rushed deadlines, strict client demands that don't allow for refactoring, and inexperienced Rails developers trying their best but getting overwhelmed by "Rails magic".After working on many of these kinds of projects, we've identified a number of categories for these kinds of problems which we outline below with possible fixes.