The content of that article is fine.  It all boils down to #2:<p>"OUR ENTIRE COMPANY’S STUFF WAS IN PHP: DON’T UNDERESTIMATE INTEGRATION"<p>Joel classically addressed this with regard to the Netscape re-write from scratch.  In a word: don't.  You have working code, meeting customer needs, and re-writing the whole thing is time you are not spending fixing bugs, adding features, or improving performance of the existing code.<p>I would say what you ended up doing in that 2 months was a massive refactoring.  You took what you had, along with the knowledge of all the mistakes you made, and turned it into the code it should have been from the start.  The key was that at every point, you still had a working system that was still integrated with all the other systems you needed to run your business, which is pretty much the definition of refactoring.<p>None of this has anything to do with Rails or PHP.  You can substitute any other two languages or technologies and the outcome would not change.  I suppose that is one thing you could have stressed more, but even from what you wrote that should have been clear to anyone not overly emotionally invested in the particular technologies you were discussing.  The comment about being perfectly willing to start a green-field project in Rails should have made that clear.<p>I also liked the part about liking SQL.  I'm finding more and more that ORMs are just getting in my way and making my code longer, slower, and harder to understand.