Why We Wrote our Blog using Rails (opens in new tab)

I'm a Python developer, and I've been deciding whether fighting the awful syntax of Ruby [1] and the complexity of Rails is worth the effort. I'm divided, because it looks like an awful mess that will take a long time to learn, but a lot of YC companies use it and a lot of HN'ers swear by it.

Is there a reason you didn't build your blog using Python (presumably with Flask or Django or the like), other than your existing familiarity with Rails?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899

I don't want to sound like a douche, but It looks to me that you did it to prove you eat your own dogfood. If you were so unhappy with Tumblr, why didn't you just use another blogging platform or software? There are many alternatives in almost every language known to man.

My company is considering the same thing. It's just too much of a pain using other tools, especially in regards to design.

It could be said that for a consultancy, your marketing/blog is a core part of your business, so having a high degree of control over branding would make sense.

Plus, using Wordpress is the last thing I ever want to do. Ever.

Another point to add is that running the podcast feed from Tumblr was not practical. Even other big podcasts that use Tumblr generally generate their own custom feeds. Now we can bake that right into the blog... as soon as I get around to it :)