I really can’t imagine freelancing with any other technology than Rails right now. Why?

1. I need to be able to make quick enhancements and show clients with in a matter of hours on a staging server. Ruby and Rails are concise, Capistrano is ultra convenient and hey presto.
2. I’m generally a 1 man team and I need code that one man can manage. To me that means it needs to be clean, concise and expressive.
3. I need to reuse. I wouldn’t be able to offer my clients competitive estimates if there wasn’t a ton of code out there that I knew was stable, clean and relevant to my projects. Thanks to the great Rails community and the Rails plug-in architecture there is.
4. These days its a requirement for me that I enjoy what I do and have a passion and feeling of achievement from it. Optimized for programmer happiness Rails gives me this.
5. I like to concentrate on design and useability. Although programming is my original trade my gift and passion is for creating useful applications. This basically means talking to end users, empathising with end users and listening, no I mean really listening to my clients. Such a concise high-level language like Ruby coupled with the pragmatic nature of rails means I can concentrate on functionality, useability, beauty, aesthetics and the rest of it rather than code, code, and more code.
6. Predictability. Well I’m not sure software development will ever be predictable, requirements evolve, business change, technologies change so predicting exact time frames and prices for projects is not easy, no not even with Rails. But Rails enables me to be agile, flexible and pragmatic so requirement changes don’t lead to a project being completely knocked off course. Changes will happen, clients are never completely happy with the first thing you show them that’s just the way it is. So I develop as part of the communication process get things out there and iterate, iterate and iterate and the code stays clean.
7. I am a designer, CSS and DHTML guy too and there are only so many hours in the day. Using a speedy framework like Rails means I really can share my time between wearing these various hats without drowning in complexity.

Ahh. Glad I got that off my chest.