Kate Rhodes is yet another developer leaving Java behind for the lack of love. As she says: “I’m really good at Java. I know my way around it but I don’t love the language.” Life is indeed too short to be spend toiling your days away without feeling a passion for the tools of your craft.

As many other Java developers just getting out, she naturally expected that life in the shade would be just as hard as under the Sun. But then she found Ruby on Rails and this was what she saw:

I decided to see how much work it would be to reimplement my project management app in Ruby and Rails with the expectation that it would probably be just be too much work to port it and rewrite the thousands of lines of code. But after spending a few hours just poking around, learning what methods to use, I’ve already gotten about a third of the infrastructure implemented and working.

It’s very encouraging to see that Java experts like Kate, who co-authoredProfessional Java Tools For Extreme Programming, can recognize the competency trap and get out of it. Welcome to Ruby on Rails, Kate!