RailsCasts was an incredible help in my early web career, and I was so so grateful for the time and effort that went in to each episode. I've wondered about this story for years, and it's wonderful to see this story start to get told. I hope Ryan is doing okay and in a good place!
RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
11–20 of 40 posts
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#12Great perspective! Wasn’t familiar with the beginning history of RailsCasta as I didn’t begin working with the framework until maybe 2014/5.
Still a big fan of rails and a good reminder to check out the screencasts again.
But my goodness so much has changed in the past 5/10 years (no surprise of course). Just last year I was converting coffeeacript files to es6 in a rails codebase now we’re converting rails to Node.
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#13These were some of the most valuable things on the web. I actually didn't follow the video content as much as the written form which was just what I needed. When someone on my team would come and ask me how to do something, I would often just point them at the railscast for that topic and know that they were going to build it in a reasonable way. So many tricky things became so easy to do, that I could really focus on the product and not the technical means. Web development has slid backward from those days in many ways.
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#14Great perspective! Wasn’t familiar with the beginning history of RailsCasta as I didn’t begin working with the framework until maybe 2014/5. Still a big fan of rails and a good reminder to check out the screencasts again. But my goodness so much has changed in the past 5/10 years (no surprise of course). Just last year I was converting coffeeacript files to es6 in a rails codebase now we’re converting rails to Node.
>now we’re converting rails to Node.
Isn't that just a full re-write, or is there a process?
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#15The article says it was too sustainable but we have to wait for the next part to find out why. Cliffhanger ending! Very interested in why this couldn’t be sustained.
Some people find public self-promotion 1000x as exhausting as other people. I can imagine that this could have been part of it.
There's also a lot of pressure to deliver weekly episodes if that was your goal. I think at some point you become unable to reflect that you're approaching burnout and should have taken a break twenty episodes ago.
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#16Railscast was chef’s kiss. I was sad when it ended.
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people find public self-promotion 1000x as exhausting as other people. I can imagine that this could have been part of it.
There's also a lot of pressure to deliver weekly episodes if that was your goal. I think at some point you become unable to reflect that you're approaching burnout and should have taken a break twenty episodes ago.
A lot of people I've known in this space have run into the problem where making content became their job and it meant they weren't doing the "real work" that created fuel for creating the content. That is, the best content came from talking about the challenges and techniques learnt in their "day job" but now their day job was running a screencast/tutorial business.
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#18I can only join the chorus and sing the praises of Ryan Bates. Railscasts was a blessing, I checked his videos almost every day. Sad when he left - spoiler alert, some sort of burnout I understood at the time... Ironically I now work for a startup helping employees cope with their work environnement. Very curious to finally hear Ryan spill out the whole story... and happy to hear about him again !
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#19Same as most of the comments here, RailsCasts taught me a ton about Rails and saved thousands of hours. Thank you Ryan for creating a treasury of Rails knowledge.
Re: RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel
#20After getting hooked by DHH’s “Blog in 10 minutes” (or whatever it was at the time, 2008 or so), I spent a few days in Denver with Mike and Dave (and Nicole!) for Pragmatic Studio’s Rails crash course, and that really opened my eyes to how powerful the framework could make me. But when I was done with those few days, I spent so much time feeling like I couldn’t figure things out, or like I wasn’t productive enough as a programmer. I think RailsCasts was mostly responsible for getting me past that.
It was so helpful to follow along with Ryan as he explained his decision making processes, and how he would solve specific problems. Prior to then, all I really had was self-experimentation, and a lot of great books that seemed to get out of date faster than they could be printed. Even today it’s still a huge help to have Chris Oliver and Dave Kimura sharing their expertise, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 15 years of web development, it’s that I need whatever help I can get to stay on top of what is currently going on.
So thank you Ryan, I am looking forward to Part 2 of the series.