Rails and New Beginnings
29 Mar 2018Way back in 2010 during my college years, I added functionality and fixed bugs on a Rails 2.3.x carpooling application. It was my first introduction to MVC and I loved working with Rails. I felt like I could clearly and quickly implement workflows.
The high point of my time with Rails was during 2013-2014 when I attended Rails Conf and worked with a friend to implement a DevOps SasS with Ansible and Rails. Around this time, I had enough experience to see complex problem “ecosystems”. Soon after, I started playing with other languages and frameworks.
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Meteor caught my attention with its pub/sub and mini mongo ideas.
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Go’s ultra-minimalist perspective and thoughtful standard library was a breath of fresh air.
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Jupyter’s (iPython Noteboks) quick and dirty approach to data and visualizations pushed me to experiment on data faster.
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R’s ecosystem of packages, amazing authors, and blog posts taught me about the nature of aggregate functions.
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SQL forced me to do more with less while working with financial data without the Rails’ ActiveRecord ORM.
What I learned about myself is that I was slow to move away from the Rails conventions I had come to know and leverage so well. All the experimenting helped me become a better learner. But along the way, I found myself wishing each tool was more like Rails. This was good and bad … good in that I appreciated the well-ordered artisan nature of rails and bad in that I missed the seemingly “unconventional” benefits of other toolsets I picked up.
I start a new job next week where I won’t be working with Rails. The rails infused past 6 years has been great, but I’m looking forward to new beginnings with other technologies.