Welcome to Rails TakeFive, FiveRuns’ periodic discussion about Ruby on Rails with noted developers from throughout our community. This week, we’re honored to be joined by Jay Fields, noted software developer, author, and speaker.
FiveRuns: Welcome Jay! And, thanks for taking the time. Let’s kick it off by getting your thoughts on the community. Can you name a few relatively unknown or unheralded developers who you think deserve to be recognized and tell us why they rock?
Jay Fields: George Malamidis, Philippe Hanrigou, Pat Farley & John Hume are all not as well known, but superstar developers. I’ve worked with all 4 of them on projects and I would go out of my way to work with all of them in the future. They all possess the fantastic combination of being both innovative and pragmatic. They all have blogs, speak at conferences and contribute to open source. You might not have heard of them yet, but you definitely will in the future.
FiveRuns: Okay, we’ve all made mistakes. Name one of your most embarrassing moments of FAIL, or one of your biggest rookie gaffes.
Jay Fields: Several years ago I was working for ThoughtWorks and I became the Tech Lead for a team building a Ruby application that used a DSL for the business rules. It was the most interesting work I had ever done, but I made a huge mistake. It was a very short project, 3 months in all. In general I believe that premature optimization is a mistake, but on a timeline that small we really needed to start looking at speed early in development. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it a priority. In the end we spent the last 2 weeks of the project working on the performance, and barely got the project out the door.
FiveRuns: Do you agree that Rails presents a big opportunity in the current financial environment, because of the 5-8x productivity boost, the fact that Rails is open source, and the limited accompanying infrastructure costs? How is the economy affecting your work and/or your livelihood?
Jay Fields: I think Rails presents a big opportunity regardless of the financial environment. In fact, I think history shows that to be true. Companies didn’t start adopting Rails because of the financial environment. The adoption of Ruby/Rails has been on the rise since it’s introduction. I do think adoption will slow eventually, but not until all of the talented Ruby/Rails developers are out of the job market. Ruby absolutely makes better programmers more productive, companies would be foolish to ignore that whether they are up or down. Ruby isn’t the answer to all problems, but if it is an answer to your problem and you choose a more ceremonious language, you’re probably making a mistake.
The economy hasn’t had any impact on my livelihood. Computers have become so integral to everyone’s life, I don’t expect any good programmers are out of work. In fact, regardless of the financial environment, I think good programmers will continue to enjoy larger than average raises. If you aren’t getting better than average raises, you either aren’t as good as you think you are, you are trading money for some other form of happiness, or you’re missing opportunities.
FiveRuns: Mike Gunderloy recently did a post outlining the process for contributing code to Rails. What was your very first contribution? What motivated you to get started? Nowadays, how much time do you spend battle-testing your code with friends and fellow developers? How often do you make use of the rubyonrails-core mailing list or the #rails-contrib channel on IRC?
Jay Fields: I’ve never actually had a patch committed to Rails, but I’ve had a few ideas that ended up making it into Rails in slightly varied ways. The most popular is probably the test class method that can be used when writing tests in place of defining test names that start with test. I was motivated to contribute to Rails because I felt that the current options were inferior to what was available, and I was tired of customizing Rails with each new project. There’s also a nice feeling (for me anyway) when you have an idea that can help the community as a whole. I’ve never used the IRC channel, but I’ve found the mailing list to be a great testing ground for patches.
FiveRuns: Have you ever taken a Ruby-related course or seminar, either in-person or virtually? Who are some of the best teachers and courses out there? For nubies? For pros looking to break through to a new level?
Jay Fields: I spend a fair amount of my time learning. I’ve always been in the work-smarter-not-harder camp. In the past few years I’ve attended as many as 6 conferences a year, and there’s almost always a few great presentations. I’m a big fan of conferences usually, but I’ve also been happy with the Pragmatic Studios and The Rails Edge mini-conference. There’s so many great guys in that group: Chad Fowler, Dave Thomas, Mike Clark, Stu Halloway, Justin Gehtland, Marcel Molina Jr, Ezra…. there’s really too many great guys doing Ruby and presenting to name them all. I’m also a huge fan of Geoffrey Grosenbach and PeepCode screencasts. Between those guys there’s information for everyone from a Ruby hobbyist to a professional Ruby developer.
Jay Fields is a software developer and consultant at DRW Trading and www.jayfields.com.
He has a passion for discovering and maturing innovative solutions. His most recent work has been in the Domain Specific Language space where he has delivered applications that empowered domain experts to author domain logic. He is very interested in maturing software design through developer testing and software testing in general.
Jay is also the author of Refactoring: Ruby Edition and a contributor to Advanced Rails Recipes.
Continued Discussion
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