Why opinionated?

A while ago I was suffering PHP-itis. I was sick of it. After 10 years of using it I was tired of it. I actually had a lot of fun with it and produced some interesting software. But I was getting frustrated by the amount of work one had to do to get things done. Granted, I never looked into any PHP framework that would have made my life easier. I wasn’t a happy programmer.

Then one happy day, while reading my friend Sebastian’s blog, I stumbled upon Ruby on Rails. It was love at first sight. I became a happy programmer again. But the love ended the day I started deploying a couple of apps I wrote with it. It was a nightmare. Crashes everywhere on the production server while it ran like a charm on the development servers. Yes, several.

As I was looking for help, I discovered the fact that the RoR community is not very friendly and somewhat elitist. I was ready to give up on it and go back to PHP and *any* of the PHP frameworks. Anything at that point would have been better than RoR. The only thing I still like about RoR to this day is their “opinionated” slogan. That will be a subject of another post.

Enter Python.

While I was growing a little frustrated with RoR, and looking for help, I stumbled upon several articles comparing RoR with Django. My first thought was “just great, another language.” The funny part is that I had been hearing about Python for years, and for whatever reasons I avoided it. What a mistake.

My decision to take the plunge was that while working as a system administrator, using Ubuntu, I noticed that a lot of the tools were made with Python. Then, while learning Blender, bam! Python again. So, at this point I decided to take a closer look at Python and Django, figuring that it would be nice if I could use the same language for system administration, web development and 3D.

Needless to say, while I still keep an eye on RoR and “play” with it, it is just that, a toy. All my web development from now on will be done with Django. Opinionated? Maybe, thanks DHH!

I will elaborate more on why I like it so much. Stay tuned!