This is the first post to the first blog I ever put online.

That's not to say I've never designed a blog, coded a blog, or even written blog entries. I've done all that. No, this is just the first one I ever finished well enough to share with you. So what was different this time?

It's going to sound cliché, but, honestly, it was Ruby on Rails. Up until two months ago I had been working in Java with Spring and Hibernate. Programming was becoming a chore. It wasn't something I stayed up all night to do because I loved it; I was staying up all night wrestling with Tomcat/Eclipse/JSTL/Spring/Hibernate/Acegi/etc.

Before those dark days of Java, I worked in PHP. I wrote countless web platforms in PHP for fun, a couple of those even became real sites. They had nice features, were pretty flexible and extensible. They were based on many of the same ideas as Rails, but were never something I would call elegant. PHP just lacks that certain something.

So about two months ago, shortly after attending the Building of Basecamp workshop in Seattle, I gave in and decided to see what this Ruby hype was all about. Long story short, about three days later I decided to stop all Java development and convert existing projects to a language I'd only heard about days before.

This site is here because programming is fun again. Thanks Matz and David.