I have been building an API using Ruby on Rails for the last few months and have thoroughly enjoyed everything Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework have to offer. The Rails Guide is incredibly well-written, and going through it to learn Rails has been a great experience.

The JavaScript ecosystem, however, is constantly evolving with new ideas for building applications. There’s Node.js, Bun, Deno, Cloudflare Workers, and many more. I’ve been following the updates to all these from the sidelines, eager to try one of them for my side projects.

Yesterday, I finally did just that—I spent the day with Deno. I had last worked with it a few months ago, but the latest release made me want to give it another try. Getting started was easy. Claude was helpful in teaching me the basics. I kept prompting, and it kept improving. The initial setup was straightforward, and I had an API service up and running within minutes.

However, four hours later, it was a mess. The deeper I got into validation, migrations, and endpoints, the more I found myself constantly rewriting how the application code was structured. It just didn’t feel right.

This experience made me appreciate mature frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Laravel even more. The next time I have some free time, I’ll start with a well-established framework instead of building everything from scratch. For now I am sticking to Rails to continue building my side project.