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Or How Rails Let Me Embrace My Lazy Side

Before learning Rails and Ruby, I was a dabbler. I can program in many languages and have written lots of different things, most of which have, and never will be, seen outside my computer because of reasons mostly relating to either shame or the fact that the application is entirely useless. I���d never written any application I was really proud of or was actually useful except a few Python applets and scripts.

However, Rails gave me a purpose and the perfect framework for fulfilling that purpose - creating web applications.

I was first exposed to Rails as part of my first serious job (which I���m still doing and loving ever minute of) as a web application developer. The company was an early Rails adopter and with one of their guys dropping out, they needed a replacement to get there ���Big Project��� finished. I had to learn Rails quickly, and so I did.

You could argue that the situation was what made me have to get serious with my programming, but that is only part true. It was Rails that provided everything I needed to flourish as a programmer. A wonderful environment in which to culture and grow my ideas, enforcement of doing what was right instead of what was easy. The community around Rails gave me a huge library of quality code and advice to learn from. Best of all though, Rails allowed me to be lazy and not feel bad about it.

After exposure to Rails, now I am always striving to do more with less, to improve my environment and my code to reduce to a minimum the amount of work I have to do. I want to do testing, something that until previously always seemed like a chore, a bore and additional work (the bane of the lazy person!), now I love testing, because it makes my life easier and gives me more time to do new, fun stuff instead of debugging broken code without a clue where to start.

Rails lets me be lazy in the best possible way, one I really can justify calling efficient. Rails has given me a passion for programming which I never had before and it gave me the perfect tool I needed to succeed in my chosen career.

Rails didn���t just make my programming better, it made my life better.