Discussion on Hacker News Discussion on lobste.rs
I love a good side-project. Like most geeks, I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when faced with problems - give me a minor inconvenience and I’ll happily spend weeks building something far more elaborate than the situation warrants. There’s joy in having a playground to explore ideas and “what ifs”; Building things just for the sheer hell of it, as Richard Feynman put it “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”.
So when my covers band started having trouble keeping track of our setlists and song notes (“How many times do we repeat the ending?”, “Why did we reject this song again?”…) I decided to build an app. We’d tried various approaches from spreadsheets to chat groups, and nothing seemed to work or provide a frictionless way of capturing notes and planning gigs in a consistent way.
I’ve been working on https://setlist.rocks for the last few months in my evenings and spare time and I’m pretty pleased with the result. But most importantly (and the subject of this article) is that I’ve also re-discovered just how enjoyable building a web application the old-fashioned way can be! I usually gravitate towards retro-computing projects as I’ve been pretty bummed out with the state of the modern landscape for a while, but I can honestly say I haven’t had this much fun with development in a long time. And that’s mostly due to just how plain awesome Rails is these days.
The Unapologetic Rubyist
I know, right? Rails. That old thing ? People still use that ? But as I was doing this purely for fun, I decided to forgo the usual stacks-du-jour at $DAYJOB , and go back to my “first love” of Ruby. I also figured it would be a great opportunity to get re-acquainted with the framework that shook things up so much in the early 2000s. I’d been keeping half an eye on it over the years but it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything serious with Rails. The last time I properly sat down with it was probably around the Rails 3-4 era about 13-14 years ago now. Life moved on, I got deep into infrastructure and DevOps work, and Rails faded into the background of my tech stack.
The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey paints a similar picture across the wider developer world as a whole, too. Rails seems to have pretty much fallen out of favour, coming in at #20 underneath the bulk of top-10 JavaScript and ASP.NET frameworks:
And Ruby itself is nowhere near the top 10 languages, sitting just underneath Lua and freaking Assembly language in terms of popularity! I mean, I love me some good ol’ z80 or 68k asm, but come on… For comparison, Javascript is at 66% and Python is at 57.9%.
But I’m a stubborn bastard, and if I find a technology I like, I’ll stick with it particularly for projects where I don’t have to care about what anyone else is using or what the latest trend is. So Ruby never really left me. I’ve always loved it, and given the choice, it’s the first tool I reach for to build something.
In recent years, the need to glue infrastructure together with scripts has diminished somewhat, as most things seem to be “black boxes” driven by YAML manifests or HCL codebases. But when I first discovered Ruby, it felt like finding a language that just worked the way my brain did. Coming from Perl (which I’d adopted for sysadmin scripting after years of shell scripts that had grown far beyond their intended scope), I read Practical Ruby for System Administration cover-to-cover and realised Ruby was “a better Perl than Perl”. There’s the same wonderful expressiveness to it, just without all the weird voodoo. I love the way you can chain methods, the blocks with yield , and how even complex logic reads almost like English. There’s just this minimal translation required between what I’m thinking and what I type. Sure, I can knock things together in Python, Go, or whatever the flavour of the month is, but I always feel on some level like I’m fighting the language rather than working with it. And of course there was the welcoming, quirky “outsider” community feel with characters like Why the Lucky Stiff and their legendary Poignant Guide To Ruby.
... continue reading