I'm a full-time Rails developer, and I've run into the exact pains that he's talking about. By and large, I've fought with ridiculous things as projects grew, a

I'm a full-time Rails developer, and I've run into the exact pains that he's talking about. By and large, I've fought with ridiculous things as projects grew, and run into extremely 'magical' bugs. It's frustrating as hell. But I've found the way through them is actually to lean into ActiveRecord, not away from it. When it really boils down to it, ActiveRecord is a perfect pattern to deal with the "submit a form, validate it, run some logic, return the results" round-trip that's the core experience of web applications. Do you have validated data you need to do really complex logic on? Sweet. Send it on over to some PORO's. Have a complex query that isn't easy to cache? Nice! ActiveRecord will get out of your way. What's really hard is figuring out how to frame the problem in a way that makes Rails a great solution for it. This part is really really hard, I think in a lot of ways akin to art (and by 'art' I don't mean some deeper honor or aesthetic - just that there's no guidance), since the principles and patterns actually come from your domain and not somewhere else. And the developers I know who really hate the way Rails does something, especially ActiveRecord, are huge on applying patterns. When I've taken the time to think through how to structure, really deeply, the applications are a pleasure to change and modify even when I come back much later. And for me, the proof is in the pudding: those aforementioned other developers who hate ActiveRecord don't complain! They'll see it, give a small 'huh,' then go do what they need to do just fine. But when I don't, they turn into the twisted spaghetti nightmares. I see a massive sub-current of dissatisfaction with Rails, and I think the reason for this is just a subtle but markedly different priority of thought. I can't articulate it yet, I just know what it looks like when I see it. Anyway, I love Rails as it is now. Soon I hope I can deploy a single application across web and mobile platforms natively, along with supporting them all, as one guy. That's insane. Really like this blog post because I've got some things I'd like to be able to do with the ActiveRecord API, but I'm not really sure how. I don't know why the thought never occurred to me to just ask!