Date published: 9-30-2013

Rails version: 4.0.0

What does automagically mean?

One of the first descriptions I heard about Rails was that it handled things automagically to make programming web sites quicker and easier. I’d never heard the term before, so I looked it up online and found this definition: automatically; in a way that is hidden from or not understood by the user, and in that sense, apparently “magical.” That was the way I felt when I worked through tutorials, and even though I’d written the program myself, I had no idea what it was doing to make it work in the background. The worst part was that even after learning how to do something, I couldn’t just sit down and write my own program using what I’d just learned. Usually the new program I was trying to make would break in some way, and I wouldn’t know what was broken or how to fix it because too much was happening automagically for me to know where to even start. Continue reading »