It's 2011, and over the last four months I've migrated away from Ruby on Rails and back into the PHP MVC framework realm.
My last excursion with any PHP MVC framework was based on CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and Symfony, of which I had a combined six years experience. Each framework had its share of pros and cons on a per project basis.
Ruby on Rails had always been a framework I wanted to learn, but only because it was something I kept reading about over and over and over. I did a good job avoiding this for five or six years by instead learning other useful languages like Python, Perl, and even dabbling in Objective-C and Cocoa. Halfway through my second set of Objective-C and Cocoa books, I felt my brain slowly imploding. Time to take a break from this limited-use garble and get back to web development.
Ruby on Rails was refreshing because the Rails books seemed to speak my native language: web. But for some reason, Ruby has always felt like that baseball pitcher who was so inconsistent you couldn't tell if they were brilliant or incredibly horrible. Stepping into the batter's box, Ruby would throw sinking curveballs I'd eventually adjust to and send sailing over the fence. But each trip to the plate, more often than not, I'd manage to achieve a full count before being beaned or taking a walk. (You don't really strike out as a developer. You can always figure out a way to reach the end goal. Some ways are just absolutely the worst ways ever, but a base hit is a base hit.)
I grew tired of the inconsistencies. On a whim, I happened upon a new opportunity leveraging a fairly new PHP MVC framework: Laravel.
Because of my Ruby on Rails experience, my RBI, OBP, and SLG averages have been through the roof. Laravel has a wicked yet beautiful slider that I look forward to, and its fastball is down the center of the plate at 86 MPH, just like at the batting cages. Because of Laravel's syntax and workflow consistencies, my confidence as a developer has been at an all-time high. When I do see the knuckleball, a nice changeup, or a curve, I'm prepared. And I Bo Jackson the hell out of it.