Yay, that's exactly what our industry needs; more cargo cult programmers writing terrible software! Let's just be glad that this RoR guy isn't building anything safety critical.
We've been talking a lot lately about the decline of quality commentary on HN, and the increase of negativity and snarkiness. Parent is a great example.
OP, I enjoyed the post and forwarded it on to some friends. Nice work!
I wasn't claiming that I am an awesome programmer but I got good enough to put myself into a position where I could learn from awesome programmers, on the job, while getting paid.
I did the same thing, by the way, though it was ages ago, so no Github or anything like that. The only thing I'd change, looking back, is that having got that first job I allowed myself to get stuck. I was doing one kind of work using one set of tools and even though I got good at it and made money at it, it constrained me mentally. A lot of programmers fall into this trap. It's insidious because you don't know you've fallen into it. Something ends up having to shock you out of it and that is not a good place to be. Perhaps if I had studied CS I would have started out with a broader sense of the field. In the end it took quite an effort to maneuver my boat into larger (and deeper) streams.
It's alot easier to call for Rails devs since it's so ubiquitous at this point; as opposed to, "We need a Python dev with Django/Flask/Webapp2/Pylons/Tornado experience", the Ruby on Rails echo chamber -- because of its "singularity" feeds itself...
Everyone wants Rails guys
Bravo, RoR, bravo.