In Edward Bellamy's utopian novel "Looking Backward", a man from the 1890s awakens after 100 years and sees the wonders of the new age. What would a programmer from 2004 think if they woke up in 2014's web development utopia?

When you work with Rails every day, it's easy to forget how much it changed web development. But the influence of Rails is still being felt today in the Ruby world and beyond. Let's rediscover the Rails revolution by looking backward at its impact on how we work now.

Luke Francl is a developer at Swiftype, which provides search engines as a service. His career has focused on web application development using a variety of technologies, including Tcl (seriously). He has been working with Ruby on Rails professionally since 2006.