At first (and for admittedly way too long), I used this as a way to try out fun new frameworks - Node+Express for one thing, Phoenix for another, SvelteKit for a third.

I noticed it was a huge pain to dive into these things once every 6 months. I’d forgotten how it worked, and for some of them at least, I could look up docs and examples.

My Node+Express thing was the worst because it was all homegrown. There’s very little convention in that world, and you have to make your own. No docs were coming to save me, and this was in the Before Times, like 3 years ago pre-LLM.

Anyway I ported everything to Rails and it’s wonderful. I know how it works, there’s almost 30 years of examples online and they even mostly still work, and LLMs are great at it too.

Lots of power in a good framework, in a situation that’s a good fit for it!

I realize Laravel is built on Symfony but using Symfony directly is a different experience