I Almost Quit Programming

I almost quit programming.

The Struggle

By that point, I had spent 7 years deep into languages like C, C++, and Java, with occasional dabbling in ASP, PHP, Pascal, Perl, and numerous others. None of them ever truly clicked. Programming felt mechanical, rigid, devoid of the joy I had hoped to feel when I started in high school and into college. The excitement of building something from nothing but an idea had faded into the rigidity of the frameworks being used. My job had become a chore, my passion had dimmed, and I was seriously contemplating a radical life change. I’d even applied to the Peace Corps, ready to step onto an entirely different path, uncertain but eager to explore new passions I hadn’t yet defined.

But life had different plans.

The Turning Point

My former manager unknowingly intervened at this crossroads, recommending a book: “Agile Web Development with Rails.” Intrigued yet skeptical, I gave it a shot.

I read the whole thing in a few days. Ruby was expressive and eloquent, everything I had wanted programming to be. Rails let me bring ideas to life in minutes or hours rather than the weeks or months I’d grown used to. For the first time in years, I wanted to write code when nobody was making me.

The Transformation

For the next few months, I built dozens of applications. Each one was a revelation. Ideas that would have taken weeks in Java or C++ materialized in days. I was coding late into the night, not because I had to, but because I couldn’t stop. The joy of creation had returned, and I was making up for lost time.

That excitement led somewhere concrete: I partnered with my former boss to found Intridea, a Ruby on Rails consultancy. We hired Ruby engineers I’m still proud to have worked with and built apps for everyone from early startups to Fortune 100 companies. Ruby and Rails didn’t just rescue my programming career. They redirected it.

What Ruby on Rails Gave Me

What Rails actually gave me, looking back, wasn’t a framework. It was a different relationship with code. Where I’d seen constraints and boilerplate, I started seeing possibility. The conventions removed the friction that had made programming feel like drudgery and left the part I’d fallen for in the first place: take an idea, make it real, build something from nothing.

I’d assumed the problem was me, that I’d burned out on programming itself. The problem was the tools. That’s a distinction worth knowing about yourself before you apply to the Peace Corps.

Coming Full Circle

Today I’m feeling the same thing again, this time with AI. The staying-up-too-late-because-I-can’t-stop feeling, the one Ruby gave me twenty years ago, is back. I’m building things alone that would have taken a team before, and it’s fun in the same specific way Rails was fun: the distance between an idea and a working thing collapsed.

I don’t know if AI reshapes my career the way Rails did. But I recognize the feeling, and last time I trusted it, it was right.