Tell your Rails story
Posted by David August 30, 2008 @ 03:32 PM
I’ve been receiving some very moving stories about how people came to be Rails programmers from incredibly diverse backgrounds over the years. I even talked to a taxi driver once who was taking me to the airport that was doing Rails. Or the guys who were looking to quit programming who started enjoying it again with Rails.
All these are powerful stories that I’d love if we could share with the world. So let’s try to do that! If you have a great story about how you came to Rails, then please send it to david at loudthinking dot com with the subject “My Rails story”. I’ll filter all those into a folder and we’ll find a way to publish them.
A friend of mine and I had to program an application to manage 2 cash points that automatically had to send orders to a kitchen in a food-selling event. I had to do the db analysis and he would have coded everything in VB and MS Access. He started try to code the project and realized that it was much above his current skillset. When he realized that the deadline was approaching, so I took over the situation and said: “I’ll code that in Rails” (it was April 2005) and I had never coded anything in Ruby before. Needless to say, we delivered in time and with features above all expectations! Rails saved the project!
I was working as Enterprise Architect at a Bank, and I started a small shop as investment and decided to build a custom app to have some fun, and looking for something to build fast I found Rails, I found it incredible, also because at 2000 I built an e-banking framework with asp (1.0), and I did not have objects, routes, before filters, pagination, but I dreamed with that and I found it in rails, was like a dream come true :-)
It’s funny – I just blogged about how I got introduced to Ruby and Rails last night. Here’s a link.
http://www.techdarkside.com/coding-its-like-having-a-soul-again
this is no joke. i shit you not. it’s because of a single key on my keyboard.
my keyboard at the time had lost its 4 button somehow. at the time i was in about my 5th year of php land residency.
i always knew that php wasn’t it for me, but never knew what was next.
then i started hearing about this rails thing on the blogs that i read. i watched the infamous screencasts and pretty much fell in the love right away.
all the same obvious reasons why people love ruby and rails, but the thing that sealed the deal for me was that there weren’t dollar signs all over the place. $ == shift four. i didn’t have a four, so i had to switch languages. :)
with some friends one month later i moved to seattle, unbeknownst to me a hot bed of ruby activity. a couple months later we started going to the seattle.rb meetings and met/became friends with all these rubyists whose blogs i had been reading while getting into ruby and rails.
so really it came down to a missing 4!
While CTO for a web consulting firm a few years ago I had heard people talking about Ruby on Rails. As any good nerd I went to check it out. Surprisingly, despite reading, OK scanning, 3 WHOLE BLOG POSTS, I didn’t “get it.”
A few months later a potential client mentioned that they would only do their project in RoR. We didn’t take the project, but I did think maybe I should take another look. I went to Borders and bought “Rails: Up and Running” and “Agile Web Development.” I did the Up and Running tutorial in an afternoon and was hooked. The Ruby language was so beautiful and there was just something about the whole thing. There was something almost “zen” and calming in the language and framework.
On our next project, I suggested we trying doing things the “rails” way. That was almost 2 years ago. While that initial project looks a lot like PHP in a peculiar syntax, it is the most successful and active of any project our company built.
Since then, I’ve built dozens of sites with Rails and would never think to go back. The speed of development, and more importantly, the awesome Rails community, has honestly changed my life. It’s made me a better programmer and allows me to build better sites for clients and for myself that are more solid, better designed, more maintainable, and in fraction of the time.
I love it. If this is a ghetto, then let me live in the ghetto.
In a company i used to work doing PHP and Java projects, we were starting a new one and they told me we were going to use PHP.
Meanwhile, i was using Rails at home, i got the latest version, i think it was 1.0, 1.2 stable version wasn’t released yet for sure.
I told them how cool Rails was but they didn’t want to experiment with new stuff. So i start doing it in PHP at work and everyday when i came back home, i was doing it in Rails.
After 2 weeks, i show them what i have done in Rails in my spare time, they couldn’t believe that it worked so well and how fast i did it.
Of course all the next projects were done in Rails, a year later they sent me to the Railsconf all the way from Argentina, where i live.
My story is not that out of the normal, but for me it has been a supreme experience.
I started programming with RoR to get all my ideas active. I have many many good business ideas for sites, but can’t afford a programmer nor can find a decent one around here. So I started my search for the most suitable programming language/framework for this project so I started with PHP, then I heard of this framework that was combining all the best about everything and so the love began.
I had been a perler for years, and had also hacked together a few sites in PHP. Both had become grotesque and burdensome. I didn’t want to do any more.
A friend at work introduced me to ruby and to rails. In just a few months I had gone through a handful of books and had convinced TPTB that we need to standardize our team at work around a unified platform and that the platform needed to be Ruby on Rails. A project that someone in the group had been struggling for months was replaced with a demo done in 2 weeks while going through the skateboard book. The app was more responsive and more robust.
I took a week-long class and have redone some of my side sites in Rails. We’re going to the Lone Star Ruby Conference next week as well.
I love it. It makes programming fun again.
I just got a job at a web host as a support tech. I was a bit in over my head, but we kept getting support requests for rails, which none of the support people knew much about yet. I decided I’d try to specialize and tackle the rails support requests. That led me to getting a job doing a website in rails, which became permanent. I’ve been there almost 3 years, doing the odd internal rails project when we need something quck. Now we’re starting a web version of our desktop software and of course it’ll be in rails!
Being a such pro-PHP defender, I couldn’t understand why I wanted to play with RoR.
So I am trying to develop all the Rails skills I can. And I’m on the way to do a few screencast (in French) to explain how to install and use RoR …
I finished university with a degree in management about 2 years ago, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a management consultant. I worked for a friend of a family member in web design, briefly learning php and mysql.
I kept reading on the blogs about ruby on rails, and began to learn about it. About 6 months later, I landed a job at a web 2.0 start-up, and had a hell of a time in start-up land, something which I had a lot of interest in but never imagined I would actually be working in.
Thanks to ruby on rails, I escaped a career as a suit and got to experience life in the sharp-end of business at 2 web start-ups, so I’m very glad I came across it when I did.
I come from China. Please allow me to tell u my store with chinese. thank u.
我曾经使用Java, 使用spring, hibernate, struts, 这么多框架搞的我很头疼。 虽然有Appfuse这样的一站式框架，但是繁琐的xml配置让我非常难受。 后来我看到了Rails， Rails很棒， 也让我喜欢上了Ruby语言。 然后我就开始寻找Rails的全职工作，来享受我的Rails人生。
you might have begun to guess my meaning. haha.
Its obvious when one looks around the net that both ruby and ROR have changed the way we all work and play, including myself.
long live rails + ruby!
I came to Rails thanks to my friend Jon. I was looking for a framework (php at the time) to develop an app I had in mind. I asked Jon and he suggested Rails since I really didn’t have that much PHP experience to begin with. Now it’s been a few months. And I have made that app (http://filmpundits.net) and just made a custom blog app (renpatel.com)!
Rails is awesome. Especially for beginners! Thanks Rails (and Jon)
In 2005, I decided to change the direction of my career and work primarily with developers (exclusively). At the time my idea of developer was PHP-monkeys. Unfortunately there were already 1000s of designer-developers in the PHP space. Then I discovered Ruby on Rails.
In 2005, Rails was still pretty young and not very popular with the web community as a whole. So for me is the perfect opportunity to gain an edge. So I made it a point to learn rails as much as a design could allow himself without going absolutely insane. Since then I never looked back. I’m on my second all ruby on rails gig as a designer and loving every minute of it.
I was introduced to Rails by a person I introduced to it.
In mid 2005 I was following the SvN blog and became aware of Rails. At that time I was laying out a new project and planned to do it in Java, but hadn’t started coding yet. One day while meeting with a J2EE “architect” the topic came up. He had never heard of Rails. I promptly forgot about the conversation.
A few months later I was again meeting with this individual. He told me he had something cool to show me, a little subversion utility he wrote. He said he had built it in no time with Ruby on Rails and had a blast doing it. I was really surprised, as this was the first person in Indiana I’d seen using Rails, so I asked him where he heard about it. He said “from you” and smiled (rather than calling me an idiot).
I told him that I never thought of using Rails for anything serious, but he said absolutely and suggested I use it for my project. So we did and never looked back.
Hi,
I found Dynamic Languages and Specially More information about Ruby + Rails while surfing few years back.
It was my first sight love with Rails. I think.. I am Ruby, and Rails is my girl friend. We are together since years and dating each other regularly for hours.
This is my short and Sweet Story.
SoftMind.
First off, I love Flash and Flex and have always wanted to use them to create intensely dynamic experiences on the internet, so people can ultimately speak their ideas with worlds of interactive and beautifully connected content.
But Flash and Flex have never been able to easily connect to a backend database, not to mention be built into Enterprise level applications. Then comes Flexible Rails, Flex and Rails. The most amazing team on earth! I think they, together, will blur the line between thought and content, and people will wave their hands and their ideas will be born.
Back a few years ago I wanted to create biology software using python, but despite it being a very efficient dynamic language, it would’ve taken forever to connect it to Flex or Flash, not to mention architect the python application according to my own implementation of design patterns. Coming up with a solid implementation of design patterns is tough.
Then comes Rails. Rails is the most amazing implementation of design patterns I have ever seen! And with something like Ruboss, you type two or three lines of code into the Terminal and you have a full on database-backed and Rails integrated Flex application! Insane…
Needless to say, I have chosen Ruby on Rails over Python, and I am happier than ever. I have experienced that programming joy everyone’s talking about with Rails. If you haven’t tried it yet, definitely do it! Design patterns will change the world. They are the principles by which structure arises in the Universe….
Adios, Lance
Here is my experience: http://d-jones.com/2008/6/27/ruby-on-rails-from-hackers-to-the-enterprise
I had worked on an open source web based application written in modperl (LON-CAPA). When the time came at my new QE job to build a web application to share test results, I needed something that made my life easy, would quickly show results, and be simple enough that I could do all the coding myself.
My own requirement was that I wanted to do object oriented programming as I’d done some in Perl and found it suited my programming style. I also wanted a chance to learn a new language. Java looked (and still looks) overly complicated. I felt Python would probably be the way to go, but I’d read a bit about this “Rails” thing and decided to read a bit more.
Once I saw the example code and the active community it was easy to spend my own money on the “Agile Web Development” book. I was able to get the site up in three months (I was continuing with my daily work at the same time, for the most part). It’s a simple application that I’ve had to extend now and again. Every time I get into the code it makes me smile.
I do fear that when I leave this job the application will be scrapped as “foreign” technology by the engineers here. Then again, the recent improvements have gone a long way towards making it an integral part of the development process, so it’s likely they’ll need to maintain it despite themselves.
I could probably go on and on about how much I enjoy rails but I’ll keep this brief and simply say that since discovering Ruby and Rails I’ve become a significantly happier programmer.
During my work as consultant for automotive companys and designed a business intelligence software from the scratch. So in december 2006 i asked a friend who is professional software developer and he said we will do it in rails.
So after half a year still not started programming, i bought a book and started learning rails and ruby from the scratch.
Seven month later i had the first presentation. At the moment i deployed the first application.
So i learned so much about rails=>ruby=>linux=>databases=>webserver… Rails experienced my mind and it is every day fun to ride with it…
I would say thank you to the rails core team and the open-source community…