In software engineering, there's always a moment where the community erupts over some new framework or technology. Sometimes it's genuinely new. Sometimes it's just something old that got rediscovered and paraded around like a returning messiah.
2009, enter Ruby on Rails for me.
I remember not understanding what on earth this was. What was Ruby? What did "On Rails" mean? Subsequently, a few other "On Rails" frameworks or attempts at capitalizing on this hype appeared, which clarified nothing. Apparently "On Rails" was just a way to say "This is a scripting language but with more stuff bolted on so now it's a Big Framework."
Ruby had been around for years as a happy little scripting and CLI language. Just like Python was at the time. Then Rails showed up and suddenly everyone was building web apps with it.
I jumped onto this hype train because it was all the internet was talking about. Every forum, webcast - everyone.
It was confusing because there was so much magic. Two lines of code would accomplish seventeen things and I hated that. Convention over configuration sounded great but it felt too magical.
I poked at it for two years, then gave up completely. Haven't touched it since.
I'm not saying it's bad. I respect it and to each their own. I just didn't see the need to continue investing in a framework written in a language I've still, to this day, rarely seen used for much else.
Sometimes the bandwagon is going somewhere. Sometimes it's just going. Whoops I meant the BandRailsTrainThing.
puts "GG but not for me"
❤️🔥
Jake