I remember Ruby on Rails first being announced, and Why's Poignant Guide, and the first PragProg book about Rails (as well as Try Ruby).
Back then I was a teenager and doing most of my stuff in PHP, because in 2006/2007 most of the resources about PHP and MySQL I could find were all about that, and I was still at the level of just injecting some PHP into my HTML to make it dynamic (back then Javascript/DHTML was something you copied and pasted and there was only rarely a reason to seriously use it). This was the era of PHP, Cold Fusion, classic ASP, CGI and so on. Not to mention that shared hosting providers (the cheapest option for web hosting) only really gave you PHP under Apache to work with (or the LAMP stack as it were).
So this Ruby on Rails looked cool but I couldn't get my head around it at first, I was still super green. Skip forward from 2007 to 2009, right before my first professional gig, and the seed had gestated. Suddenly I was running a minimal Rack/Sinatra server around a Redis app purely because I needed a leaderboard and I learned about things like ZRANK and ZADD before I understood what sorted sets were. I did try to advocate for Ruby at my first job but they were of the mindset that literally anything and everything could be built through Drupal. I will leave that thought to your imagination, although I owe my team mate a lot for properly mentoring me when it came to javascript, closures (back in the day where articles about closures in JS were the same as more recent articles about monads.) He didn't just show me jquery, he gave me the low-down on JS itself.
I'm made redundant and after that, I go deeper into Ruby. I get a job in London of all places and thus began my career as a full stack engineer specialising mainly in Rails, and Ruby. My interested in the language grew ever stronger and it remains strong to this day, a good 10 years later. I dabble in a lot of other things these days too, because that's what I enjoy, but I'll always find myself back with Ruby when I need to be pragmatic. It's a beautiful language with a strong community that values developer experience, and my only real wish is that I learn enough to be able to contribute back to the language in a meaningful way,
Back then I was a teenager and doing most of my stuff in PHP, because in 2006/2007 most of the resources about PHP and MySQL I could find were all about that, and I was still at the level of just injecting some PHP into my HTML to make it dynamic (back then Javascript/DHTML was something you copied and pasted and there was only rarely a reason to seriously use it). This was the era of PHP, Cold Fusion, classic ASP, CGI and so on. Not to mention that shared hosting providers (the cheapest option for web hosting) only really gave you PHP under Apache to work with (or the LAMP stack as it were).
So this Ruby on Rails looked cool but I couldn't get my head around it at first, I was still super green. Skip forward from 2007 to 2009, right before my first professional gig, and the seed had gestated. Suddenly I was running a minimal Rack/Sinatra server around a Redis app purely because I needed a leaderboard and I learned about things like ZRANK and ZADD before I understood what sorted sets were. I did try to advocate for Ruby at my first job but they were of the mindset that literally anything and everything could be built through Drupal. I will leave that thought to your imagination, although I owe my team mate a lot for properly mentoring me when it came to javascript, closures (back in the day where articles about closures in JS were the same as more recent articles about monads.) He didn't just show me jquery, he gave me the low-down on JS itself.
I'm made redundant and after that, I go deeper into Ruby. I get a job in London of all places and thus began my career as a full stack engineer specialising mainly in Rails, and Ruby. My interested in the language grew ever stronger and it remains strong to this day, a good 10 years later. I dabble in a lot of other things these days too, because that's what I enjoy, but I'll always find myself back with Ruby when I need to be pragmatic. It's a beautiful language with a strong community that values developer experience, and my only real wish is that I learn enough to be able to contribute back to the language in a meaningful way,