We've just passed the three year anniversary of Ruby on Rails' first release to the public. Which in turn means that I've been working on the framework for more than four years. Wild.
It's been an incredibly rewarding experience. I've met so many great people. Worked with so many talented programmers. Seen so many amazing sites and applications be launched off Rails.
To image that this whirlwind tour all started because I wasn't happy working with the mainstream environments and decided to give Ruby a try. And to image the impact Ruby on Rails have had on the industry with none of the big-company backing that traditionally is needed to make waves there.
What's even more rewarding is knowing that we're not done. That the work to make web-application development ever more pleasant continues every day.
We might have taken the pace of radical changes in the core framework down a few notches (remember when we did multiple releases per month?), but the steady stream of improvement and refinement continues relentlessly.
So cheers, Rails.