I came to Node after four years on Rails and about 10 years of PHP before that. It definitely felt like a step back from Rails, but that's partly because Node

I came to Node after four years on Rails and about 10 years of PHP before that. It definitely felt like a step back from Rails, but that's partly because Node wasn't meant just to be a web framework. I've gotten pretty comfortable with it, but I feel like the original decision to use it (which predates my joining the company) was primarily driven by how shiny and cool it is. The vast majority of what we do is standard CRUD stuff. On a personal level I've enjoyed learning it, and from a career perspective it's nice to have it on my CV, but had I been on board when the original decision was made I would definitely have chosen Rails. (Plus they also chose to use MySQL for no good reason. We've managed with it just fine, but in literally the last three weeks we ran into some limitations that would not be a problem in Postgres. The CEO, not being technical, doesn't quite understand why changing the database midstream is not something you do without really compelling reasons.)