Happy Birthday, Rails!

It was 10 years ago today that David Heinemeier Hansson announced Rails. It seems like only yesterday, and at the same time it’s hard to remember what web development (or even our lives!) was like before Rails.

I recall being fed up with all the make-work involved in building J2EE apps, and Rails felt like a breath of fresh air. Coincidentally, I had been playing around with Ruby and looking for a way to use it in earnest. Building web apps with Rails offered an ideal opportunity to really dig into Ruby. And so I quickly made the jump and never looked back.

A year or so later with two Rails apps in production, Dave Thomas and I thought it might be fun to teach a public course on Rails. Nicole volunteered to coordinate it and the good folks at FGM graciously offered us a great space to teach. We figured if the first course went well then we might have enough interest to do a couple more. Turns out that the first course sold out and The Pragmatic Studio was born. Fast-forward 9 years, and we’re still happily teaching Ruby and Rails! It’s been an amazing ride.

Many thanks to David and the entire Rails community for creating and evolving Rails all these years! And thanks to all the good folks who’ve supported us over the years through our courses. Honestly, we wouldn’t be here today without you!

To see how far Rails has come since 2004, here’s the original “How to build a blog in 15 minutes with Rails” video (affectionately known as the Wups! video) that started the revolution:

Wups — it worked! :-)