The author lost me at complaining that you need to know Ruby to know Rails. In case this was not self-evident, the Rails guide itself says plainly and early:
I love getting paid to program. The trick is in carefully selecting projects, teams, and clients plus actively setting expectations (e.g. staying in the driver's seat) such that you are not working on other people's schedules. Otherwise, yes, freelancing turns out to be just like having a boss. And that's no fun.
I've tried fix-rate project delivery. It's a nightmare. Either you spend so much energy up-front to document in detail the finish line, or you spend so much energy on the backend fighting scope creep. Maybe I did it wrong the times I've tried.
"Ignore advanced web developers complaining about ‘not another Bootstrap website’" I agree. It's your customers that matter. And unless you're building a product for advanced web developers, pleasing them should be no matter to you.
I've shown Bootstrap sites to non-developers and the response is usually that the sites look nice. Never has it been "ug. boostrap?".
The image shown in this article does a good job of highlighting the usefulness of Glass. It's not just a heads up display. It's the smarts of knowing where you are, what you are doing, what you plan to do in order to provide relevant information in an automatic and unobtrusive way.
"Oh, I see you're at the airport and you have tickets on flight 644. Here's some useful departure info." Instead of finding a departure screen or tap-tap-tapping on your phone - it's just there.
You forgot one type of person. "People who wait for the walk sign because they've got other things on their mind and make the conscious choice to leave deciding when to cross the street up to the street light." Waiting for the light lets you cross the street with hardly any thought at all, freeing that thought up to do other things.
These people realize you can only do so many tasks so why not delegate the least value-added (what are you going to gain by earning 15 seconds) of the tasks to someone - or something - else? It's a no-stress, win-win to give yourself one less thing to worry about.
When I compare my 15 years in the office to my 7 years full-time telecommute, I can say without a doubt that I get a lot more work done working form home. Anyone who hasn't experienced the huge amount of time wasted in big-corp office environments hasn't worked in big-corp offices.
Let me try another way. Some Rails apps that are too unwieldy are barely even Rails apps. They just happen to have Rails at some layer of the tech stack, but also have many other non-Rails components such that saying "Rails" has become too complex is disingenuous.
You're doing it wrong! Do not slap frameworks and complexity on top of Rails. Rails' strength has been unchanged from day 1 - "favoring convention over configuration".
Rails is for building web apps. 99% of the world's web apps will work fine with Rails, an RDMBS, a web server. That's about all you need. Anything else is probably just developers wanting to play with the latest toys.
So yes, if you try to avoid Rails' conventions, you will have trouble. But it's not Rails' fault.
Despite the consensus that college has little value to hackers, Stripe team members come largely from Stanford, Harvard, MIT and other major universities. Is this and the fact that Stripe's products are highly regarded just a coincidence? Would it be the same team and products without the team members' Ivy league credentials?
I think the answer is no and no. The benefits of college education are widely underestimated.
Why does success == exit? I guess to each his own, but I would hate to be working for years on something with the goal being some finish line, especially when often "exit" for the founders means being sucked into another organization where you have even less control over choosing your work. So many other ways to measure success that this story falls flat for me.
It's almost like the diet and weight-loss industry. We spend way more time and effort on trying to solve the problems than on preventing them in the first place.
Want to balance work/life? Here's the secret formula which I'm giving away for free today only:
Work 40 hours / week
Sleep 56 hours / week
Play 72 hours / week
This formula covers everything discussed in the blog post. What's surprising about it is that it is nothing new!
We're way overthinking this. The American workforce has been getting up, going to work, coming home and enjoying time with friends and family and hobbies for decades without having an industry of workflow systems and work-life balance editorials. But to make it this simple sells no books, attracts no seminar attendees, and brings in no blog readers.
"If you have no prior experience with Ruby, you will find a very steep learning curve diving straight into Rails." http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#guide-ass...
Where did anyone hear and/or read otherwise? Similarly with all the other complaints. To me, they sound like straw men.