Welcome to this week’s Rails TakeFive interview, our continuing effort to bring together Ruby and Rails aficionados from throughout our community to share their thoughts on all things RoR. This week, we’re happy to be talking to Michael Slater of BuildingWebApps.com. A project of Collective Knowledge Works, Inc., BuildingWebApps.com creates platforms for organizing and sharing the knowledge of a community. The first community upon which they have focused is their own: Ruby on Rails developers.
FiveRuns: Welcome Michael, and thanks for taking the time to join us. Let’s start by talking about your introduction to Ruby on Rails. What was your first “ah-ha” moment with Rails and when did you know that the framework was a good fit for you?
Michael Slater: I was leading a research group at Adobe in mid-2006, working on a variety of photo management and sharing projects. The developers I was working with were experienced Java folks, and they began talking about how much more productive they could be with Rails. That got my attention, and we started a Rails project. Unfortunately, it was not a good fit for Adobe’s conservative mindset, and neither was I. I ended up leaving Adobe to dive into Rails myself, and went back to coding after 15 years in management. It was a lot of fun. Rails was a perfect fit for my desires as an independent developer.
A few months later, one of my Adobe colleagues, Christopher Haupt, also left, and the two of us founded Collective Knowledge Works, Inc. We’re building a new platform for building web sites that are focused on serving a community of people with a specific interest. It’s a combination of content management and community, with some extra twists. Ruby on Rails has been a perfect fit for our needs; it enables us to build and iterate quickly.
FiveRuns: So in your work at Collective Knowledge Works, you have been exposed to a pretty wide range of Ruby on Rails developers. What would you say is the coolest and/or most innovative Rails project that you have seen in recent memory?
Michael Slater: I think MicroPlace is pretty exciting. It enables anyone to support small businesses in the third world in an efficient way. This is a really interesting way for us to use some of our western affluence to help others who live in much more difficult circumstances but share our entrepreneurial spirit. It’s very nicely designed, and it’s also interesting that it’s owned by eBay. So it’s an example of Rails getting some traction at one of the largest “old” web companies.
FiveRuns: Where do you go for Rails-related news and insight? Any particular website, blogs, forums, etc. that are of particular value?
Michael Slater: If I can be forgiven a little bit of self-promotion, the resource I use the most is our own site, www.BuildingWebApps.com. This is built on our Collective Knowledge platform; we’re using it both to give back to the community, and to provide a proving ground and exploration vehicle for our technology. We aggregate the best content from all around the web, as well as publishing our own original articles, podcasts, and screencasts.
There’s a lot of great blogs in the Ruby and Rails world, and I read a lot of them. Part of our goal at BuildingWebApps.com is to tag and rate the posts from these blogs, to provide a more organized, central resource. I like Peter Cooper’s rubyinside.com for general Ruby information. For Rails, I always enjoy Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski’s writing at therailsway.com. Other blogs I get a lot of value from include Jay Field’s blog.jayfields.com and Josh Susser’s blog.hasmanythrough.com. The Rails Forum site is also a great resource.
FiveRuns: Is Rails still waiting for its killer app, or are we already there with Basecamp, Highrise, Twitter, Hulu, Revolution Health, and of course BuildingWebApps.com?
Michael Slater: I don’t think the killer app concept really applies here. We don’t need a killer app to drive adoption of the platform—there’s thousands of smaller apps that prove the value of Rails.
That said, it would be helpful to have a “big hit” that was built in Rails, something that was one of the ten or twenty highest-traffic web sites. The lack of such a site is one thing that feeds the skeptics and gives pause to some companies considering Rails for projects that they dream of reaching these kinds of volumes. It’s not so much a killer app that we need as much as a proof of Rails’ ability to scale to very high traffic levels. I have no doubt it will happen; it’s just a matter of time.
FiveRuns: There was a great article recently on the Rails community in Austin and the Austin on Rails user group specifically. Are you part of a local user group? Tell us about your local 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.
Michael Slater: I live in Sebastopol, an hour north of San Francisco in beautiful Sonoma County, and creating a developer community up here has been challenging. I ran the North Bay Ruby User’s Group for a year, and it’s been hard to get enough attendees; we haven’t quite been able to reach critical mass. Our big local tech center is the headquarters of O’Reilly Media, and they’re almost entirely a Perl and Python shop. But I have met a couple of great people through that group.
Occasionally I make it down to the San Francisco Ruby User’s Group, and I’ve found it to be fun and useful. That group is large and vibrant, with most meetings hitting the limit of the meeting space. It’s great to see what other people are building, hear some war stories, and swap ideas. It’s also nice to meet people in person who I’ve met via email, or whose blogs I’ve been reading.
Michael Slater is President of Collective Knowledge Works, Inc. He is an entrepreneur and software developer with 30 years of experience creating innovative products. In addition to developing and managing BuildingWebApps.com, he operates BoatingSF.com, a resource for boating on San Francisco Bay.
Michael was previously Director of Technology Strategy at Adobe Systems. He joined Adobe when it acquired Fotiva, a venture-funded startup he cofounded to create a better user experience for consumers moving to digital photography. Fotiva created one of the first tagging-based products for organizing photos. Prior to Fotiva, he was President of MicroDesign Resources, where he created the Microprocessor Report newsletter and the Microprocessor Forum conference. From 1987 through 2000, he published hundreds of articles on computer technology and presented dozens of seminars and conference keynotes. Michael began his career as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard and was an independent engineering consultant from 1980 through 1987.
Michael is the author of several books, including Organize Your Photos with Photoshop Elements 3.0, The Photoshop Album 2.0 Book, RISC Microprocessors, and Microprocessor-Based Design.
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