Recently, our lead developer left the company. At first, I did what I always do...I panicked, no...freaked. But two weeks later or so, my work load has increased, (read keeping from doing absolutely nothing), and it appears as if we are going to start working with some other languages.

In particular I am excited about finally getting to do some PHP work. We\'ve been focused on Java for such a long time and I was going nuts. If it weren\'t for our moonlighting business, I\'d never get to touch PHP. As it turns out now, I get to do a quick little one off project for one of our largest customers in PHP. I am really glad that I get to spread my wings a bit, particularly in an area where I feel more confident.

With these changes though, we are also picking up a language that to me, is still a buzzword. Granted the Ruby programming language has been around for a very very long time, it is just now getting some recognition. My worry however, is that Ruby and Ruby on Rails is still just a buzzword. For some reason, I am having a hard time getting by this assumption.

The good point that was brought up was that, our customers don\'t normally need to see, or much less, even care what we use to do the job as long as it does what its supposed to do. That alone should allow me to clear my concerns, however unfounded they are, but I\'ve just got this ticking in the back of my head saying \"buzzword bandwagon\" and that bothers me.

Still I am excited that I will be learning another language. The more tools I have in my belt, the more flexible I can be in providing solutions...(for both my 8 to 5 job as well as our moonlighting gigs...) and that never hurts.

So yeah, things are going to change around here, and quite alot it seems, but at least it won\'t be the tragic, frightful event that I had originally panicked about.