Your happiness does not depend just on your intelligence, but also on the place, and community you live in. Imagine Galileo amongst the Christians, helpless and hopeless because he was right, but to the world around him, he was wrong, a witch, and punishable. What should I do in situations like this? I have no clue. I am not even Galileo, and the world will forget me as soon as I die.

In this blog, I would like to note that I regret using Rails because of people around me.

Zanec

The first was this company, Zanec. Till then, I was involved in small Rails projects and large PHP projects, but in Zanec when I could code fully in Rails, I was happy. It was for a real estate website, https://places.com. I don’t think places work now.

Anyway, at that time, we had to work with a Ukrainian called Dennis Volchov or something, I am not sure of his name. And at that time, Ukraine was invaded by Russia (2014). This Dennis does not know Rails, half-baked in Ruby, and he insisted that Rails migrations are antipattern; he does not want migrations, no matter what we said, he did not want it.

Being a Rails guy, it was frustrating for me. According to him, SQL (Data Definition Language) should be noted in a file, he simply did not understand what migrations are and how easy it is to reverse them. He did not like the concept of a lot of migration files in the db/migrate directory.

I lost hope and thought this was my fate. But by some miracle, the client believed in me, and though he did not stop Dennis sabotaging Rails migrations, he did support me on many occasions. The client name was Joe Mathew, he was from a company called Software Worx, which he ran. Till that date, he was the best client I ever had.

He also shielded me from internal politics at Zanec, without which I wouldn’t have lasted so long. I am a technician, not a politician.

Trumatics

I met an excellent guy at Zanec called Umashankar (Uma as we called him). I was captivated by his philosophy and leadership. He created a company called Trumatics, I wanted to join it, and he let me in. Things did go well initially. But then, when it came to the Rails project, Uma did not understand incrementally building a Database as we went along with the project.

For him, the database should be defined first using Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD), and then the database should be created, and only then should the app be coded. He is an affirmative person, but he did let me do the project in my own way, maybe I explained to him, and he got to know what Rails was.

Unlike the people who ran Zanec, he was not a person who totally lost touch with tech, so he let me do my way. I think I worked on a project for a company named Zynalog.

But as my bad time would have it, something changed in him, he stated to shout at me, at the people in office in an intense way, and we had no clue what was going on. One day I couldn’t bear the pressure, and though I was one of the directors of the company, I quit.

One of the last things I knew about him was that he was bad-mouthing about me, but who cares? I am sure people who are closely aligned to facts have better chance of succeeding.

I think a few years back we did have a friendly call where he was saying how engineers (freshers) knew nothing, and should be significantly coached up.

My dream of creating a better Zanec, that would be technically good, and a company that would be loved by employees went up in smoke.

HealthiCity

I worked for a company called HealthiCity, and I would say that its VP Kekin Gada was my best client to date. In the JD it was said that one must have basic / little knowledge of React. I thought there would be a front-end developer, and when he is absent, I would need to consult him and make some minor front-end changes. The interview was about Ruby, and it was nothing for me. I cleared it.

Once in the company, I regretted, I was made to learn ReactJs, it sucked. Rails had already killed ReactJs even before it was born. I wondered what made someone who claimed they knew Rails, make a Rails developer code in ReactJS?

It turns out the people in HealthiCity are from a services company called Big binary, and for them, ReactJS is like God, no matter how unproductive it is, it should be used in the Rails project. They made the mistake of choosing React, and since the top leadership till now has failed to acknowledge their mistake, they are making people code in ReactJS + Rails at gunpoint.

I was forced to learn ReactJS; there was a class for ReactJS held, I was forced to code CSS; and I don’t know if blue goes well with orange or what. I don’t give a damn about font and design. Design bugs were assigned to me. It was hell.

One good thing born out of this was Injee. Since I needed to learn ReactJS, I needed a back end, I thought, why not code a zero-configuration instant backend, and so was born Injee.

I am a back-end developer who was forced to learn front-end against my will, but I feel Injee will free up front-end developers to learn back-end. So even though I suffered, it led me to create something that will reduce the suffering of others.

Would love to work with pure Rails people

I still think Rails is one of the best frameworks for developing web apps. Though my knowledge of Clojure is challenging it. I would like to work with pure Rails people. That would be really refreshing. In my country, India, most people are half-baked when it comes to knowledge of tech. They are willing to work extra hard but are not willing to come out of their pea-brain thought, and people are not willing to change, be efficient and follow the Rails way.

If you want really stable, awesome apps created, contact me, and I will be able to help you. If you are a pure Rails person and want me to work with you, I am thrilled.