Welcome to the second installment of Rails TakeFive, our ongoing effort to to provide insight and commentary from notable members of the Ruby and Rails community, with the goal of facilitating an ongoing conversation around all things RoR.
This week, we’re happy to have Michael Coté, a software Industry Analyst with RedMonk join us in the discussion.
FiveRuns: Welcome, Coté. What was your first experience with Rails and how did it come about?
Coté: I did some pair programming with my old friend Charles Lowell (now of The Frontside Software) to play around with doing a simple SNMP client. I wanted to get him to show me Ruby and Rails, and that’s the super-exciting application we picked.
FiveRuns: We’ve seen job listings that amusingly seek “a Rails expert with 5 or more years of experience.” What does the job market look like these days for Rails developers?
Coté: From what I can tell, if you’re willing to move where the demand is or be a consultant, then the prospects are good.
FiveRuns: People always talk about “convention over configuration” as a paradigm that is central to why Rails works as well as it does. Can you say a little more for the newbies out there about why this so important?
Coté: From my view – being a Java programmer, for the most part – this means having to think less and make fewer choices. With convention, you have a lot of the “how should this be done?” questions answered, so you can avoid those boring meetings where everyone seems to be delivering a dissertation on the best way to implement a check box or configure a sub-system. Instead, the Rails school of thought just makes that decision for you. Of course, that can piss off all the people who like to be in meetings and show how smart they are – or, maybe they just like arguing – but at a project level and for those of us who could give a crap how exactly something is configured, it’s a relief. It’s sort of like code-formatting: you can argue forever over it, or just pick something and move on with life. Many coders choose the first as if it’ll affect customer happiness, but that code’s gotta ship sometime. Convention over configuration is much like that to me.
Of course, the other practical effect is that there’s less configuration to mess with. XML config files were fun many years ago, but now it’s sort of like the dish washing of programming.
FiveRuns: In his RubyConf 2007 Keynote presentation Matz stated that “The suits people are surrounding us” – is this increasingly the case with the community, and what does this mean for the future of Ruby?
Coté: Sure. Where there’s the development ease and success that other questions here hint out, there’s gonna be “suits” – non developers who want to make money off of developers. And why not? We’ve all got bills to pay. Just make sure you don’t sell the farm or get fan-dangled. Or, if you do, realize that most suit/code-monkey hybrids typically need one big blow-up with “the suits” before learning their lesson and moving on to success in their next 3-piece adventure.
FiveRuns: Where do you go for Rails-related news and insight – any particular website, blogs, forums, etc. that are of particular value?
Coté: I mostly get it from talking with people in email, face-to-face, #drunkandretired (the DrunkAndRetired.com IRC channel on freenode) and, increasingly, Twitter. Usually when we mention something on the DrunkAndRetired.com podcast about Rails, we get plenty of feedback and “input” there as well ;).
FiveRuns: What do you think about Curt Hibbs’ opinion that by running Ruby under the ever-present JVM it is now much easier to sneak Ruby into companies through the back door, especially since Ruby can call and inherit Java (and vice versa)?
Coté: Sounds good to me. Developer technologies really only find wide success when they’re snuck in anyhow. Really, that’s the sort of natural and planned for evolution of any technology. If it’s not good enough for people to sneak it in, it probably needs to be better.
On the other hand, what you’re really coming up against here are ops people who don’t have the support needed to actually run your Rails apps once you throw them over the cubical wall. Managers can always be won over with rational arguments or, at worst, magazines. Ops people on the other hand have to actually run the applications they’re given, and have their necks on the line when things go wrong and the programmers are safe at home playing Wii and catching up on TiVo.
I hear there’s a company in Austin that can help with that ops problem, though ;).
FiveRuns: Have you ever been part of a “Big Rewrite,” as Chad Fowler has put it? What advice would you give to anyone about to take on such a project?
Coté: While not in Rails, I’ve been part of plenty of Big Rewrites. The biggest advice I can give is, as I recall, what Joel said: don’t. Barring that, try to rewrite as little as possible. Maybe the teams, including myself, I’ve worked on were just idiots, but after rewrites, we ended up with just as many problems and headaches as we had before a rewrite, they were just different than before. Usually, it’s best to rewrite the culture of the team or company first, nail down what we used to call “domain models” and “use cases” (or, the collective understanding of what the software is supposed to be doing, its culture if you will), and then determine if you still need to worry about re-writing the actual software.
Coté is an analyst at RedMonk covering primarily enterprise software, specializing in open source, IT management, software development, collaborative, the web, and social/collaborative software. His blog is available at PeopleOverProcess.com and he produces the RedMonk podcast as well as the video podcast RedMonkTV.
Before joining RedMonk, Coté worked at BMC developing the BMC Performance Manager family of enterprise systems management products. Prior to BMC, Coté worked at a wide variety of tech companies and startups such as The Cobalt Group, Coral Technologies, and one of the first, and still thriving, online banking companies, FundsXpress. He also produces the popular code monkey podcast, DrunkAndRetired.com.
Continued Discussion
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