When you started working with Rails some years ago, it all seemed so easy. You saw the blog-in-ten-minutes video. You reproduced the result. ActiveRecord felt great and everything had its place.

Fast forward two years. Your blog is now a full-blown CMS with a hundred models and controllers. Your team has grown to four developers. Every change to the application is a pain. Your code feels like a house of cards.

You turn to the internet for assistance, and find it filled with silver bullets. You should move away from fat controllers, it says. But do avoid fat models. And use DCI. Or CQRS. Or SOA. As you cycle through patterns, your application is becoming a patchwork of different coding techniques. New team members are having a hard time catching up. And you're beginning to question if all those new techniques actually help, or if you're just adding layers of indirection.

You start missing the early days, when everything had seemed so easy and every new piece of code had its place. You actually liked ActiveRecord before it drowned you in a sea of callbacks. If only there was a way to do things "the Rails way" without having it fall apart as your application grows.