About Left of the Dev (formerly Everyday Rails)

Left of the Dev is about writing software for fun, good, and sometimes profit. Historically, it focused on the Ruby on Rails web framework, but these days it can and will touch on any software-related topic, including testing, Django, game development, agentic coding, security practices, and developer experience.

Some background

My name is Aaron Sumner. I’ve been writing software professionally for more than thirty years, in (to name a few languages, in roughly chronological order) BASIC, AppleScript, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, Lua, and others. I’ve shared my thoughts and experiences as a developer since 2010, starting this site as Everyday Rails before rebranding as Left of the Dev in 2025.

Philosophies and personality quirks behind the articles you’ll read here:

• I’m a strong believer in the net good of open source. It is far from perfect. But I admire people who share openly in the software world, and do my best to emulate them.
• I do not learn well from first principles. I usually need to start with a real problem, get a good-enough solution together, pick out the key concepts, and deep dive into those concepts as need or interest apply. Don’t expect a lot of Hello World tutorials here.
• If someone else open-sourced code that does what I want, I’ll run with it. I’m busy and don’t have time to reinvent wheels. I’m guessing you don’t, either. If you can do it better? Sure. If you really want to learn a thing? Go for it. Those traits don’t usually apply to me (see: learning from first principles).
• Developer experience matters. Down with redundant boilerplate code and arcane command line flags. In with code generators and savvy command aliasing! I’m old and only have so may keyboard taps left in me. Let’s automate the mundane and save our fingers for work that matters (and/or is fun).
• I am pragmatically bullish on AI-assisted software development. I get a lot of mileage out of agentic tools in my daily work. I also have legit concerns about artificial intelligence (ethical use or lack thereof, environmental effects, etc.). I know we’re in a bubble. I am balancing personally, and while I’ll share things I’ve learned, I also won’t make you feel bad if you’re not using Claude or Codex or whatever tomorrow’s hot new robot is. And I don’t care to hear from people on the extremes of this discussion.
• Shiny things are fun, but don’t roll them straight into production. I try to keep up on emerging tools and trends. Sometimes I have a quiet Friday afternoon to noodle around with them, and share my impressions here. These are not endorsements!

For more background on Left of the Dev (formerly Everyday Rails), you may enjoy my reflections on this site’s 15th birthday from May, 2025, and the Left of the Dev re-brand announcement from October, 2025.

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Left of the Dev is published using the Jekyll static site generator and hosted on Netlify. Code highlights use the Tomorrow theme by Chris Kempson, adapted to Pygments by Moz Morris. Analytics are ethically gathered by Plausible.