I have a confession to make: I’ve never written a blog post before.

With that out of the way, the above statement is no longer true. Time to celebrate!

( cue music, celebration ensues, so on, so forth )

Whew! Celebrating is hard work, time to catch my breath.

( goes off and does yoga for 30 minutes )

Now onto the harder work. Why yet another programming blog? Focused on Rails… in 2016?!

So glad you asked. If I may so enumerate:

  • I spent the first 10+ years of my career working on very non-Rails-like systems

    I grappled with big, bloated enterprise C/C++/C# code bases in the 100K - 1M LOC area. Static typing, great. Poor to non-existent test coverage and overly architected design pattern soup, not so much. While I may not be the first dev to escape enterprise hell on the way to the land of Rails and honey, my insights at times may be different from a typical Rails dev, for better or worse.

  • I’ve been called a Mikey (as in “Mikey likes it”) for strange and hard to solve issues.

    No lie. At those enterprise positions I would often go around asking for meaty issues in-between projects. It was important that I get to work on things other devs had taken a crack at and failed. The way I saw it, I could work on synthetic programming puzzles from a book to keep my mind sharp, or I could work on actual, real-world problems with an inherent business value. Doing this type of work taught me to be innovative in some rather unorthodox ways.

  • I want to inspire

    Prior to moving onto Rails work I was beginning to lose my love for software. I even almost accepted a promotion to management! Fortunately in a moment of crisis I stumbled upon Chad Fowler’s wonderful The Passionate Programmer, discovered Rails, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since (hardly). I know there are others out there like I used to be. I worked with them. I had lunch with them on a daily basis. I listened to all their sob stories. And I’m here to say: “yes, there is a better way”.

On a more personal note, it is somewhat frustrating to have most of the good work you do stuck behind private repos. I’m no one special, just another dev searching for deeper truths and simpler code. This blog is a way of proving that I can walk the talk.