The Rails team have finally updated that old “How to make a blog in 15 minutes” screencast. The new one is much swisher, with Ajax, XML and JSON.

I’m a little bit sad because the original screencast changed my career path completely. It might have happened anyway, but I think I can identify finding Rails as an important moment, and I found it by watching that screencast. Before I wanted to be a banker or consultant of some kind, now I realize that what I really like doing is messing around with computers. And I’m good at it!

I played around with computers when I was a kid, but left it behind when I did my A-levels and went to university. It wasn’t until 2006 that I started programming again, in Ruby, and wondered how I could have forgotten how fun it all was!

So thanks DHH and the Rails team. You made programming fun enough that it sucked me in and changed my life completely.