> Sorry for the interrogation, I'm just really curious and thinking of a transition myself. No worries, keep asking all you want and I'll do my best to answer

> Sorry for the interrogation, I'm just really curious and thinking of a transition myself. No worries, keep asking all you want and I'll do my best to answer them. > Can I ask why you feel that way? Mostly because I was getting burnt out in PHP, the community was getting pretty hellacious, and because I wanted to do something new. Regarding the Rails question, I actually when decided to leave PHP I was debating on learning Rails/Ruby or moving to NodeJS. But because I had been tinkering with NodeJS already (I wrote a pretty extensible IRC bot with a few friends to get the hang of things) and because I already have an understanding of JavaScript I would go NodeJS. It helps that I'm not jumping between 4 languages in my stack, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS to 3 languages. Why I feel it was the best decision is mostly because it made me a overall better developer. I started learning a lot more stuff, and found out very verbose things in PHP are simplified in JavaScript. I mean, look at popular PHP frameworks vs popular NodeJS frameworks... Laravel and Symfony are orders of magnitudes bigger than Express and Hapi/Sails. PHP while getting better at it, has the NIH mindset whereas NodeJS is about building small packages that do one thing and one thing only and everyone uses them. > What do you think about Rails vs Node/Express/etc when it comes to startups? Are more choosing Node lately, or is Rails still the startup gold standard? I think NodeJS is a solid alternative. There's huge companies using NodeJS now, Walmart, Netflix, PayPal just to name a few. And with the fact that NodeJS and iojs team have come together and the Node Foundation exists is great. iojs has been expanding heavily and that's good. NodeJS v4.0.0 is due out in the coming weeks and I can't wait.