About 6 months ago or so I looked at [Merb](http://merbivore.com) as a potential replacement for small apps that I didn’t want to use Rails for. It seemed cool, but pretty rough, and I didn’t have a good reason to use it.

Fast forward to the Ruby Hoedown in August. Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Merb’s creator, gave a talk about Merb. I saw some things I had missed, that were really exciting.

• HTTP Status Codes handled via Exceptions
• Emphasis on speed and small code base
• Closer match between the framework and the flavor of the HTTP spec

I checked out the code.

I played around.

I got excited about how I could keep most of the code in my head at the same time.

I submitted some patches.

Ez gave me commit.

I wrote some sample controllers and specs.

I wrote a replacement for `respond_to` that I think is pretty awesome.

I flew to Charlotte for about 18 hours for a Merb hack session at RubyConf.

Tonight, Ez pushed Merb 0.4.0 to Rubyforge.

It’s just crazy to think how quickly I’ve gotten involved in this project, how excited I am about this 0.4.0 release, and how much I’m looking forward to using this framework to build some cool apps.

If you’re interested in Merb, pop over to http://merbivore.com or join us on IRC in #merb. We’re pretty sure you’ll like it.