My entire life course has been altered because of people who have released free and open source software. The release of Rails back in 2004 was a pretty big one for me, it stands out the most in my mind. I have had a way of making a living by creating code, mostly working from home, the past 8 years. Creating an entire industry around a framework is no small feat, for sure. So to David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Rails core team, Thank You!

The positives

I recently had a post stay up for a whole day on HN, Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails and I was encouraged by some of the conversations that got started on twitter, the number of people who said they would be taking a more serious look at Meteor.js and try to learn it. My goal was to raise awareness and I am glad it seems to be happening!

An unexpected side effect of my post was the Phusion team open sourced their Meteor.js support in Passenger. They referenced my original blog post in their post title and in promotion of adding open source support for Meteor.js - so I am going to count that as a win.

Constructive criticism

Many people ask us why we use Meteor, in particular in response to that blog post, why put your blog in Meteor? Simple, having a reactive/realtime framework at your disposal makes you rethink the UI and what you actually can do with a blog. We've started to play around with passage highlighting for likes/dislikes, submitting typos back to the author, and tracking popular posts on the site in real-time - some of these were suggestions from the HN comment thread. Is it a good idea? We have no idea, but we love being able to play around with it to see what works and what doesn't. That is the true power of building something in Meteor.js

I wasn't trying to be a dick

I think the blog title got people a little riled up. While I was looking for conversations to be started and to get people interested in joining into the Meteor community, I never meant to diss the Rails community that I have been a part of for the past 9 years.

I have freely given of my time an energy to push open source ruby projects, the local ruby brigade, and ever a small study group forward. Rails has been an important part of my life, I really just wanted to convey a palpable shift that I have been feeling as I keep working in Meteor every week.

Mea culpa on the title, I meant to start a conversation not a war. I am reasonably sure if I titled the post "Why I'm switching to Meteor.js", the post would have fallen off in an hour - why is that HN?

Feeling like 2004 again

This is the biggest point I wanted to convey and I think I did a poor job of explaining in my original blog post. The reason I feel like Meteor is going to take off revolves around a gut feeling I get from the excitement of working on Meteor apps and open source packages. It is the same feeling I got back in 2004 when I first started playing with Rails. I had been using PHP at the time and Rails felt like a pretty large leap forward in dev thinking and time savings to get things done. I am getting that same feeling again and it is exciting to me!

Looking to get started with Meteor? We can help you build a meteor app!

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