Background

My first tech stack was nicknamed the “LAPP Stack”, using Linux, Apache, Postgres instead of MySQL, and vanilla PHP (no Laravel, no CodeIgniter, etc.). At the time, I thought it was a superior tech stack and would make fun of Ruby. Mostly to tease the college classmates who I perceived to be “fanboys”.

During then, and again in 2024, I had some low-key curiosity around the Ruby programming language and picked up a copy of the pickaxe book.

My first project

In 2025, I had the privilege to learn Ruby on Rails while on the job to support a team struggling with headcount. THis came after working using almost exclusively Java and Kotlin paired with Spring and many variations of SQL databases (and some Kafka) since late 2018.

Having all the tools I needed out of the box was simultaneously refreshing and a little intimidating! Thankfully, I had a great team lead that showed me the ropes and set me on the path to delivering small production-ready features for BzzAgent, a site serving over 1M users and bringing in a reported revenue of $22.4M in 2025.

After 6 months, it was time to return to working with Spring again, but something changed for me. Working with an entire system as a whole from a single Git repo was a welcome change from working on a galaxy of microservices and not-so-micro services. Like Spring, there were typically built-in functions and patterns for the majority of easily solved problems. Unlike Spring, the features I need the most come out of the box: webpages, APIs, DB migrations, queues, testing, and more!

Living in the Pax Railsana

As Rails developers enjoy a rejuvenating era in the ecosystem that DHH has dubbed the Pax Railsana, I’ve grown to appreciate the friendly communities surrounding both the Ruby language by itself and the Ruby on Rails framework, which remains their “killer app” though by no means the only reason to use Ruby.

The common thread from watching RailsWorld 2025 on YouTube and attending XORuby’s Chicago event in the same year is the value of building systems with compressed complexity as a design choice. Since then, I’ve grown more involved with ChicagoRuby, who have graciously taken me on as a co-organizer as of this week.

Conclusion

This is a great time to be a Ruby developer. I’m looking forward to getting deeper into Ruby on Rails on my spare time, watching people solve problems, helping Rails teams find vetted engineers, and supporting everyone who is making Ruby a great tool for compressing complexities of all sorts.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Rails scales. Massively.