Archaeology of an Obsession

I know you probably won't believe me, but I've been a fan of Ruby on Rails since before it was cool. In this age of information overload, have you ever noticed that it can be really hard to remember how you first heard about something, or when? For me, Rails is a rare example of a case in which I know exactly when and how I first came in contact with it. I had been using a really cool project collaboration system called Trac, and on their project wiki, they have a page called TracUsers where you're supposed to write a blurb about your organization and how you're using Trac. After I wrote my two lines about Texas State, I couldn't help but see "Rails is an open source web-application framework for Ruby." Thanks to how awesome Trac is, the version history tells the story. My edit was #33, on December 28, 2004. David HH's edit was 7 weeks before on November 10. I was into Rails before there was a slick website design, before the swooping logo, before any of the books had been published. Incredibly, it was still two months before Jesse James Garrett coined the term "AJAX."