I think I feel the same way a lot of talented Rails engineers do. I’ve worked with some seriously sharp Rails folks in the past, and what impressed me wasn’t the framework itself or whether it was trendy. It was that they really understood good software. They could design clean systems, spot where complexity didn’t belong, and write code that felt like it had a long shelf life.

Laravel and Rails feel like cousins in that way. Both give you conventions that save time, batteries included for the basics, and a philosophy that favors clarity over flash. They let you focus on solving the problem instead of wiring together endless boilerplate. PHP, Laravel, and Rails might not be the buzziest tech right now, but they’re mature, battle-tested, and still shipping real products every day.

Dinosaurs? No. Confident builders who know how to get things done, yes.