You should code in the language you love

Even if is not within the industry trends

Oscar Recio Gonzalez
3 min readFeb 13, 2020

This is not an objective review or analysis, is just a story of what had been happening in my programming life for the past 2 or 3 weeks…

This month the company where I work started a new project, our projects have been build with the magical Ruby on Rails, everyone of us has read all the discussion about performance, and that the language is dying and, we are afraid, so we had a few reunions with the ultra immense team of 4 people, so there we were, debating which should be our next stack.

The senior developer had been working like 10 years in the company, he has write RoR for a long time, but his heart is with Python, so he tried to convince us to switch from RoR to Django, he speaks about performance and the community and all the good stuff that comes with Python, but only he (and me in a very rookie way) knows the language and framework.

The team leader wants speed and security and good practices and everything else that you can ask in a development, and he wants to stay with Rails.

I’m like “I don’t want to learn Django writing this project which its supposed to be very important and critical”, so I want to stay in Rails.

The junior dev has no idea what we are talking about, or doesn’t care, she is doing frontend at the moment, so she keep silence.

Our candidates in google trends

We decide to give Django a look, they want me to prototype the application on both backends and give my honest opinion, once I started writing the same classes and methods in both frameworks I decided that RoR was easier because I was used to the ‘Rails way’, so I speak with the team leader, and say:

I know that we are trying to do the best for the project, but I just feel comfortable writing Rails, is not that I don’t wanna learn new stuff, but I don’t wanna risk this project chasing the shiny stuff, if it were the case, we should choose Laravel.

After all he also want to stay with Rails, so the team leader (who is like the orchestra man) say let’s go with Rails…

And… here I’m writing the foundation of the new project in my beloved Rails, and wanted to to share some of this experience with the world.

Is there a Conclusion?

Yes, kind of, at the end we as developers need to stay motivated, and comfortable, and happy, we all know that sometimes is hard, but whenever you got the chance to choose, choose whatever you like the most.

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Oscar Recio Gonzalez

I’m a developer, currently doing web related stuff, i’m also a musician and food lover