Mingle

So I’ve been coding, programming, scripting, and whatever you want to call it in PHP for a decade now.  

Around three years ago I first looked at Rails and laughed.  What do I need with this scaffolding crap?  I write my own code.  I don’t want to generate my code and then use it… what if I need “x” and “x” instead of what they’re giving me?  I laughed and threw it away because at this time, I didn’t understand.

This past July rolls around.  I take a job at a company called Grazely and begin to rewrite their entire site and structure from scratch using a PHP framework called Yii.  

Yii had a generator.  Had scaffolds.  Had ActiveRecord and CRUD principals.  At this time, I had no idea that it was (in a way) a PHP version of Rails.  Database associations (has many, belongs to, etc)… I learned all these fancy things in PHP… and was amazed.

December rolls around.  I began working at Curebit and started to learn Ruby and Rails.  The syntax was all new to me, I had no idea about Ruby.

I come from a direct C syntax family.  I’m used to semicolons at the end of every line.. C#, JavaScript, Java, PHP, etc.. but I’m also used to omitting them with VB.NET.

So just in general… Ruby was new to me… and it took about three weeks to finally get the hang of Ruby… but I’m there now.

I’m constantly seeing the abilities of Rails and using them more and more, and it’s amazing.

Things are so much easier in Rails than they are PHP.  ”10.days.ago”, “10.minutes.from_now”… makes my life so much easier.

Will I ever go back to PHP? Probably.  I still use it every now and again for various things… do I like Rails more? Yes.

After a decade of coding PHP… I think it’s time to officially lay it to rest and say hello to a new life with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.