# Why's origin story

The philosophy of Camping is a long and winding tail of origin, met by the ideals for the future of many mad hackers. The story of camping begins in 2006 on a cool winters night in Pittsburgh, where we find a hacker hunched over his computer, typing ruby code with his right hand and playing a laser theremin with his left. To the spooky sounds of his own left hand, he hacked through the night. This night, camping was born.

Lets step back though time for a minute though, to the origins of this man. Once an upstanding PHP developer, he grew weary and tired of his day job, writing endless login pages and checkouts. He dreamt of a world free of his C-flavoured prison. Tales of promised lands, where snake powered ponies run wild, dancing around campfires full of rubies glowing red as blood. They worked him to the bone, until one day his bones just up and left. He couldn't do it any longer! He was on a mission to find that fire which fueled his dreams.

In seclusion, there isn't much known about this odd man's life. Some say he went crazy. Others say he became a well respected professor. Still others suggest both of these are true. But what we do know, is that it is here, that he developed his love of chunky bacon, foxes, and children shaped like keyholes.

And so he went on, crafting his mad writings, scribblings of foxes explaining ruby symbols, and making strange music. Soon this man found himself concerned that children had no good way to make their own eBay competitors. For this reason, he created Camping.

The End.

# Actual philosophy

Why The Lucky Stiff is no longer around, so those of us who contributed early on to Camping have since become its caretakers. We continue to push the framework forward, to be more compact, to be faster, easier, more fun. These are our guiding principals:

- Camping is for everyone. It sure is great to turn an idea in to a single ruby file which creates a website. It's also great to organise an app in to several files sometimes. You can plug bits together all in a row, and grow your evil monkey in to an entire army of evil circus animals!
- Camping isn't for making money. You can make money using camping. Nobody will stop you. But we don't have any buzzwords to offer, we won't make your unit tests easier, nor help you do market research. Our main contributors certainly aren't using camping in large scale deployments, and while camping is blazingly fast, we have no idea how well it would work if you ran it on lots of servers!
- Camping is really simple. You don't need to know much, to make nifty things with it, and you can really easily add more detailed bits as needed. Your brain will thank you.
- Camping apps are easy to automatically reload. Because most of them are just one ruby file.
- Camping encourages experimentation. The whole thing is an experiment.
- If you're new to ruby, there are heaps of quirky hacks in here which will teach you all sorts of obscure, nifty, and outright strange things about the Ruby language.
- Camping doesn't take itself too seriously. We're a fun bunch, living on the edge of zany!
