Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Damon Clinkscales

This week, in conjunction with the kickoff of SXSW, the Rails TakeFive series is happy to bring you Damon Clinkscales, a software engineer at VitalSource Technologies, and leader of the Austin on Rails user group, which he co-founded in 2005. FiveRuns is proud to have partnered with Austin on Rails on several occasions, most recently on the Austin on Rails/FiveRuns SXSW Happy Hour.

FiveRuns: Welcome Damon, and thanks for sharing your thoughts. You’ve been involved with Rails for several years now. Do you have any secret techniques, tools, or other Jedi strategies that you can share with our readers?

Damon Clinkscales: There are no secrets. But, if I had to pick something, I would say that tricking out your console is critical. Set your Rails console up right by following the steps in these articles.

Another thing you should be doing is cheating. There are almost 250 cheat sheets hidden inside the Internet.


sudo gem install cheat

For example:

cheat migrations – shows a bunch of migration commands
cheat strftime – shows all the time formatting that you can never remember
cheat nonsense – shows a bunch of nonsense

If you’re a TextMate user you’ll want to check out this shortcut by Ed Silva to do a cheat lookup on any word in your editor window.

You can browse all the available cheats at http://cheat.errtheblog.com/b.

FiveRuns: Where do you go for Rails-related news and insight – any particular website, blogs, forums, etc. that are of particular value?

Damon Clinkscales: If I tell you, then I’d have to kill you. Forums, FTL. But seriously, there are many good sites. A sampling of those are Err The Blog, Ruby Inside, The Buck Blogs Here, Ryan’s Scraps, and Nuby on Rails.

FiveRuns: The Rails community at large, like many open-source communities, is in our mind very much defined by its charitable work, from the recent acts_as conference Merb/Rubinius sessions, to Chad and Marcel’s yearly RailsConf testing tutorials. Is charity in many ways the glue that binds the community together? Any charitable events or initiatives that you’d like to see happen over the next year?

Damon Clinkscales: Well, I think the open source community is a giving bunch, by definition, and the Ruby/Rails community is no different. The number of code contributors in Rails itself is pretty phenomenal. Also, check out all the hot MySpace-style bit-swapping action that is going on over at GitHub. There has also been some good coming from the Ruby community that has nothing to do with tech. Last year at RailsConf, the community donated over $33k to charity during the conference. That was a pretty staggering number I thought, and it just shows what you can do when you set your mind to something and focus people’s attention on good causes.

The regional conferences, including the Lone Star Ruby Conference here in Austin, picked up on the example set by Dave Thomas/Mike Clark at the first RailsConf and held pre-conference events raising thousands of dollars for local charities.

The latest idea that I’ve heard Chad kicking around this year is to have a code drive during the conference. This sounds like a great use of conference energy/resources to me. Even better than Werewolf. ;)

In Austin On Rails, we are putting together a Rails bootcamp this year with the idea that graduates from the camp who are looking for a project to work on can be connected up with a local charity that is lacking in technical resources. The larger point is that we can apply our knowledge of technology to change the world for the better. Sometimes the solution is as simple as making a connection between those willing to share their technical skills with those who are in need. This is one way we can make a difference, year round. We should seek out non-profits that we believe in. I’m sure there are many who need our help.

FiveRuns: Is Rails still waiting for its killer app, or are we already there with Basecamp, Highrise, Twitter, Hulu, Revolution Health, etc.?

Damon Clinkscales: I guess some folks are waiting for something else to happen so that Rails can prove itself more than it already has. But, I think most of us in the Rails community just spend our time creating useful apps, experiencing the joy and productivity that comes from being a Ruby developer. We don’t tend to worry about whether Rails has proven itself because it already works for us. Sure, some apps get extremely popular and there are scaling challenges, just like anything that becomes popular. Recently, there was an interesting post about a 300 million pageview/month Facebook app called Friends For Sale written in Rails. After reading the article, I’m sure you can see that Rails doesn’t scale. :)

I think Basecamp and Twitter clearly qualify as killer web apps. From a usage perspective, they’re both phenomenally successful and fun to use. Hey, Basecamp even made a lot of money. :)

FiveRuns: There was a great article recently on the Rails community in Austin and the Austin on Rails user group specifically. Tell us about the Austin on Rails community, what you love about it, how it is grown, and what challenges the group sees ahead of itself, in both the near and long term.

Damon Clinkscales: As the leader of the Austin On Rails user group featured in the Statesman article, I can tell you that we do have a strong Rails community here in Austin. We’ve grown from our first meeting in a tiny room with 8 attendees where I presented on Rails 1.0 to around 50 enthusiastic attendees at each meeting so far in 2008. Most presentations are given by our members. We also maintain a blog, a members directory app (written by the group), a meeting calendar, a mailing list with 100+ members, and an IRC channel. We meet monthly in downtown Austin and have recently had topics such as Ruby 1.9, PostgreSQL, and git.

While we have had good support from a core group of folks, we need to get more people involved. I would like to see us collaborating on more open source projects together. Seattle.rb’s project list is a huge inspiration in this regard. A couple of our members are key contributors to important Ruby projects and we need to lead the way in getting those who are wanting to contribute set up and ready to rock and roll.

I am also concerned about the lack of qualified Rails developers to fill open positions in the Austin area. Many Austin businesses are starting to look to Rails as a development framework and we need to be there to answer their call. A monthly meeting is obviously a good thing, but I don’t think once per month is enough to effectively address this. Weekly code sessions such as Cafe Bedouins and the Rails bootcamp under development are steps we are taking towards building up an even stronger base. I think it’s important to get out and meet with other developers, even if it’s just over coffee or beer. It’s a good opportunity to build relationships, make a habit of talking about the stuff we are building, and listening and learning a thing or two from our peers.

Damon Clinkscales is a software engineer at VitalSource Technologies, a leading provider of end-to-end software solutions in the higher education digital book market. An irrepressible ideas man, he spends some of his spare time pursuing side projects in coffeehouses around Austin. His latest project is a mashup called SnapTweet which posts your latest Flickr photo to Twitter. He is also the leader of the Austin on Rails user group, which he co-founded in 2005.