Everyday Rails is now Left of the Dev

Hello friends! I’m excited to share that I’ve rebranded this site as Left of the Dev. As my career and life have evolved over the past few years, the time feels right to make this change and take the site in a new direction.

Yeah, but why?

I worked almost exclusively in Ruby on Rails from 2007 through 2022. I built dozens of apps, watched the framework evolve into the most full-stack framework on the planet, and was fortunate enough to play a small role in helping others learn and get things done on that stack.

That was a long time ago, though. At my day job, I could hop betwen Ruby, Python, or Go on any given day. Some of the code bases in my team’s sphere are upwards of twenty years old. Most of them are not on the latest, greatest versions of their respective stacks. I’ve built expertise in the care and feeding of such old, varied, legacy systems–and how to modernize or replace them without the pain of the great rewrite. It’s not easy, but it’s surprisingly engaging and fun.

But it’s increasingly seldom that I’m writing new Ruby or Rails at work. O’Reilly is largely a Django shop now. My engineers are Django developers. It doesn’t make sense for me to push new Rails apps into our already complex mix, and I’m not very interested in leaving over a stack preference right now.

On the side, I’m having a blast writing games in Lua and sharing them through Bandageman Studios. The Pico-8 community reminds me of what the Ruby world was like in simpler times. If there are dark corners, I haven’t run into them. It’s seriously the most fun I’ve had writing software in decades.

So I have tons I want to write about and share about writing software for fun, good, and sometimes profit. But so much of that is outside of Ruby on Rails now. Rather than force Lua and Python and whatever I’m finding interesting into a Rails-themed blog, it makes way more sense to change focus.

I basically hated the name Everyday Rails a few months after my first post here, but I couldn’t think of anything better, and I’d already gotten positive traction. And, I mean, it was fine. But with DHH’s rhetoric in the past few years, keeping Rails in the name at all felt gross, regardless of what I wanted to write about.

This is a change I should have made years ago. I’m sorry it took so long, but at least I have a name I don’t think I’ll regret.

Yeah, what about that name?

Left of the Dev is a nod to the music of my youth; in particular, the song “Left of the Dial” by the Replacements, from their 1985 album Tim. I grew up on a mix of 1970s country and rock, But when I was a kid, most of the radio stations were in the lower numbers of the FM frequency–or, at the left end of the radio dial. This song pays homage to the music we had to search for (more realistically, it’s about one particular person in one particular band). There were no streaming services, no algorithms to feed us.

I’ve been lucky in my career–with maybe one brief exception, I’ve avoided the type of “corporate” or “enterprise” type of work that never suited me. I’ve got a fierce independent, anti-authority streak to this day. I love doing things my own way. Now I don’t get out to see live music like I used to, and my amp gathers dust behind me on video calls. But they are permanently ingrained in me, and will continue to influence my work here on Left of the Dev. Just more overtly.

Work in progress

As I write this in late October, 2025, I’m not done with this rebrand. I’m not happy with the logo font (it’s close to the font on the Tim album cover, but also incredibly far off). I need to review existing articles and pages to make sure they reflect the new focus. I have no idea what I’m going to do with the newsletter I never publish.

But doing this on my own, with no oversight board or stakeholders to answer to, means I can do this on my own time, as energy and interest permit. I’m looking forward to sharing my work and ideas with you in this new format.

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