Great article, and only 391 posts. Clearly I need to show up 24 hours after the fact and put in my two cents ;)

From what I've read here, it really doesn't sound like his time with rails is quite "up". It sounds like he has read the writing on the wall about rails, after a very long time with the framework (certainly longer and more involved than I've been, though I have used Rails quite a bit). This is different from realizing that a technology won't last "forever", it's a more distinct understanding that you see where things are going and how your current tools don't quite match up anymore.

But when my time with Rails is "up", that will mean that I have largely stopped using it. I'm mot counting maintenance, or perhaps the occasional one-off, I mean that if my time with a technology is "up", that means I don't use it anymore for day to day work.

I'd be interested in reading more from Piotr Solnica on this topic, because I'm in a similar spot. I don't see Rails as the ideal match for much of what I'm doing on the web, but I'm not anywhere near ready to give it up. I increasingly need much more interaction between the client and server than I get from the MVC approach, but I'm not sold on javascript front ends with a web service backend, at least not the way it's been presented now. For starters, I personally (yes, this is very much a personal trait) don't relish the idea of giving up Ruby to write most of my app in Javascript.

It's not just that I like ruby, I don't really like the idea of giving up the very rich set of languages I can choose from on the server side, or minimizing their role, in order to allow javascript to take over most of my programming work. I also feel that javascript front end frameworks are still a moving target, and I have a suspicion (like I said, I'm trying to sort this out) that when the dust settles, elaborate javascript front ends communicating with a web service written in something else won't be where I go next. I've read about some exciting new possible directions in this blog post, and I've read interesting things elsewhere (Volt, specifically, non-js languages transpiled to isomorphic javascript, more generally). It is all very exciting and promising, but is this the moment to give up on Rails, which works though I find myself increasingly shoehorning things into it? For me (again, just for me, everyone has a different set of interests and tasks), no, not yet.

Drawing on my past experience - the last time I felt this way was when web programming in java moved from the jdbc/servlets/html with libraries to struts, struts2, spring mvc, pico, spring di, jpa, hibernate, ibatis, wicket, tapestry and so forth. Looking back, I wish I'd had the conviction to stick with the old way of doing things even though I knew its days were numbered. Keep an eye on things, keep learning.

It sounds to me, from the end of this article, that this is what Piotr is doing. There are some good suggestions of where to go next, but I guess my question for the author is this: where are you going now? Is your time with rails "up" in the sense that you no longer have a substantial day to day use for it, that there is a new technology that you'll be working with now the way you worked with rails for 9+ years? Or is this more a situation where you see that your time with rails is ending - if not today, then certainly before long?