FiveRuns Blog

Welcome to this week’s installment of Rails TakeFive, FiveRuns’ ongoing series of insight and commentary from notable members of the Ruby and Rails community.

This week, we’re happy to have Jeffrey Krause, CTO and co-founder of Investment Instruments Corporation, share his views on Ruby and Rails. Investment Instruments is a provider of two Rails-based services to the residential rental marketplace, Rentomatic and Rentometer. Rentomatic and Rentometer increase transparency in the residential real estate market to strengthen relationships between real estate managers, their tenants, and the professionals who support them. Investment Instruments is also a FiveRuns customer.

FiveRuns: Welcome, Jeffrey. What was your first experience with Ruby and/or Rails and how did it come about?

Jeffrey Krause: My first experience with Rails was in early 2005. Investment Instruments developed an early version of our rent management application, Rentomatic (formerly iiproperty) using some ‘older’ technologies and were evaluating tech for our next version – we looked at the standard lineup: Microsoft, PHP, Java, and of course the tiny underdog. While evaluating Rails I was instantly giddy with excitement. I learned more and dug deeper. I created demos for our team, gave the early convention over configuration pitch, and described the vision behind Rails. I think they were convinced more by my passion for Rails than the fledgling technology – but we’ve never looked back.

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?

Jeffrey Krause: I saw the same thing with Java back in the 90s and still smile. It’s a very competitive marketplace for Rails developers and if you’re in the position of trying to hire developers and you don’t have any Rails expertise in house then you’re in an even worse position – mostly because inexperienced developers can demonstrate and code ‘basic’ Rails apps which are difficult to evaluate by nontechnical people. We have a fantastic team, but it took us several years to assemble it and we needed to look globally.

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?

Jeffrey Krause: Yes, but I’ve never thought this was bad. I’m pleased to see Rails mature and enter the ‘enterprise’ and a larger marketplace. I would hope that we are also adding to this environment. We’ve developed a ‘real world’ financial transaction based system which needs to be available and predictable – our customers depend on us daily.

FiveRuns: Rails definitely has an international following – any cultural differences in terms of uses of or attitudes towards Rails that you’ve observed in your travels?

Jeffrey Krause: We have a distributed international development team for our Rentomatic service, and have had one since our start. We did a blanket search for developers, and a large percentage was international and well qualified. Having worked with other international developers on several projects I would say there are less cultural differences with Rails because there are structured conventions and standard working methodologies built into the platform. Global is good.

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?

Jeffrey Krause: I’ve been involved with it many times and from all sides of the table. I’ve inherited projects to rewrite projects, had other engineers rewrite my code, and have rewritten my own code. I’ve also seen the ‘big rewrite’ happen with Rails apps as well – meaning a large complex site developed in Rails rewritten in Rails again. It’s hard to generalize in these cases but I would say remember the 80/20 rule and the majority of the effort is often hard to predict upfront. Many times the complexity of the site/application tends to be hidden, it can be in the minds of the original developers, cryptically coded in obscure functions, never having worked predictably in the past (because it’s complex), or just plain and simply overlooked. To counter this effort we spend 20 percent of our development time re-factoring existing code and processes.

As a co-founder of Investment Instruments, Jeffrey Krause has continued his long history of successful entrepreneurial ventures drawing on over 17 years of experience designing and building web-based applications and systems for dozens of companies. As CTO, Jeffrey leads user experience design and technology development. Prior to Investment Instruments, Jeffrey co-founded several companies providing consulting, design and technology support for public and private sectors. As co-founder and co-owner of Blacksquare, an interdisciplinary design and technology firm, Jeffrey has been a designer and consultant for some of the most notable architects in the world including Frank O. Gehry, Morphosis, and the Jerdi Partnership.

Jeffrey holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies Design and Computation from MIT. He is a former Professor of the University of Hawaii and has published on the subjects of technology and design. He has won numerous Web and Design Awards.