It took me a little while to realize that he meant something vey different when he said "Rails is fast. Mind-blowingly fast."
It's pretty damn awesome to spend all day writing business code rather than support code.
One-thousand times this. I've had some headaches with gems (chronicled earlier), but if you're building an app with minimal add-on gems then development speed is incredibly fast compared to other frameworks.
It's fun to see you chronicle your journeys from the perspective of someone totally new to the language and framework. Please keep it up.