FiveRuns Blog

Welcome to this week’s Rails TakeFive interview, our weekly discussion about Ruby on Rails with noted developers from throughout our community. This week, we’re honored to be joined by Ryan Bates, the producer of Railscasts, the free Ruby on Rails screencast series.

FiveRuns: Welcome Ryan, and thanks for taking the time to join us! We’ve asked several folks recently about Rails 2.1. With over 1,400 contributors, clearly a community effort. What about the new release excites you the most? And, what are the most important things in your mind to get done for the next major release?

Ryan Bates: By far my favorite feature in Rails 2.1 is named_scope. Rails has long had the power of scoping finds, but I don’t think it reached its full potential until now. named_scope cleans up my code considerably in every application I’ve worked on.

Second, I would have to say gem dependencies. In the past it’s always been a struggle juggling gems and plugins around for apps. Now specifying which gems an app requires (and in which environments) is so easy. I can see plugins going away in favor of gems.

For the next major Rails release, I’m excited about Active Model. That’s the abstraction of various Active Record and Active Resource functionality. This would, for example, make it easy to add validations to custom models which don’t have a database back-end.

FiveRuns: Some have said that the GitHub community is what SourceForge should have been! Now that the Rails repository has been moved over, can you talk a little bit about the benefits of Github?

Ryan Bates: Wow, I’m glad you asked this. GitHub has improved my coding more than any other tool recently. Not only because it introduced me to Git, but because it brings the social aspect into coding like never before.

There’s a saying that goes something like this. You should program for people first, computers second. It’s easier to go the extra mile for readability when you know others may be watching.

Also, one of the best ways to improve your own code is to read other code. GitHub makes it easy to follow master programmers and learn from their code.

On top of all this, it makes coding more enjoyable. Now I look for excuses to code because it’s so much fun to put my project on GitHub and share it with the world.

FiveRuns: Bruce likes to talk about “backpacking” through other languages. What others have you dabbled in and/or are you learning right now? How have these travels impacted your work in Ruby? Your overall approach?

Ryan Bates: While not necessarily a language, I have been learning a lot more about the command line and specifically Z Shell (zsh) lately. Here is a tool I use every day, but never made the most of until recently. Once you know what commands you have available, it’s amazing how much can be done by just piping a few of them together in the shell instead of writing a 20 line Ruby script.

I find Ruby and the command line work well together too. Working with files can get a little clumsy in Ruby. Now I sometimes call out to the shell in the middle of Ruby to do the job.

FiveRuns: Spurred on by the recently announced Ruby Hero Awards, who is your own personal Ruby hero, and why?

Ryan Bates: Chris Wanstrath. I have long been a fan of errtheblog.com. Oh, and GitHub. Need I say more?

FiveRuns: Obie Fernandez’s new startup Hashrocket, which has been blogged about extensively, is all about being ultra-productive in 3 days. What are your own tips around, to paraphrase Obie and 37Signals, getting real—on steroids?

Ryan Bates: Hashrocket’s 3 day launch is inspirational. As a programmer, it’s very easy for me to get caught up in how best to code something without actually coding it. I forget this important agile principle: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

Time constraints are a great way to enforce this. Next time when you need to add a feature, set the timer for an hour (give or take) and get started. If you haven’t made some good progress when the buzzer goes off, then perhaps you need to take another look at your problem and approach it from another direction or break it up. It’s too easy to waste hours or more in the “planning” stages to determine how best to code something.

I like to parallel programming to drawing. When starting a drawing you first sketch out the scene with a light pencil. It’s not perfect, but the lines are easy to erase and change if necessary. The sketch is also very fast which makes it cost little. This is important in case you start drawing from the wrong perspective, you can catch this early and start over without much loss.

Ryan Bates has been involved in web development since 1998. In 2005 he started working professionally with Ruby on Rails and is now best known for his work on Railscasts, the free Ruby on Rails screencast series.