FiveRuns Blog

Welcome to the Rails TakeFive interview series, FiveRuns’ ongoing effort to gather and share points of view from the Ruby on Rails community. This week, we’re happy to welcome three developers from TechCrunch, more specifically CrunchBase, a structured wiki project featuring technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit.

TechCrunch developer and recovering robot soccer addict, Henry Work pulled together fellow developers Mark McGranaghan, who recently left TechCrunch to head back to school to “graduate”, and their fearless intern Rob Olson to talk about Ruby on Rails and their use of the framework on CrunchBase.

And, just to let you know, CrunchBase is looking for Ruby developers. Just ping Henry if you’re interested!

FiveRuns: Thanks for taking the time to join us, guys! Let’s start off by talking about Rails 2.1, which was recently released with the help of over 1400 contributors. What about the new release excites you the most – time zones? Gem dependencies? UTC migrations? Better caching? And as a follow-up, what are the most important things in your mind to get done for the next major release?

CrunchBase: Time zones? Gem dependencies? Nay, we’re excited about the small things. Steadfast intern Rob thinks that Comment.last makes using Rails a little bit sweeter, especially from the console. Coming up, Henry’s excited about naming local variables inside collection partials, as well as setting conditions on join tables.

UTC migrations are great but they only resolve migration number conflicts. The following scenario has bitten us a few times:

• Henry creates a migration and runs it
• Gallant intern Rob creates a migration and runs it
• Both Henry and Rob push their new migrations to GitHub
• Henry easily runs Rob’s migration
• Rob curses and has to roll back his migration before running Henry’s

The other downside of UTC migrations is it’s less easy to find them in TextMate! Cmd-T then typing the migration number is basically muscle memory at this point.

FiveRuns: We’ve heard over and over 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 and how SCM and agile development go hand-in-hand?

CrunchBase: Thanks to intrepid intern Rob, we’re now fully on Git, GitHub, and Lighthouse. Though it feels like we’ve been branching and merging with Subversion since grade school, Git’s been working out well. Mark makes a good point here about how lightweight both Git and GitHub are: you can quickly — or dare we say ‘agily’ — checkout projects and see what they’re about. And that’s probably the most important thing to us; a sleek, lightweight SCM and a power repo like GitHub allows us clone, branch, merge, and deploy faster. That time adds up.

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

CrunchBase: Ezra Zygmuntowicz – great hacker with great taste, entrepreneurial, supportive of the community that grows around his projects, fearless—like intern Rob.

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?

CrunchBase: Mark, who owns the most programming books by far, will take this one:

Scheme

• Simplicity
• Elegance
• Taste
• SICP
• Functional style

Arc

• Brevity
• Discarding onions
• Challenging Assumptions

Mark also notes: “less code, in a functional style, building on and creating the right abstractions.”

FiveRuns: Beyond Merb, there are a great number of alternative frameworks for Ruby, including Nitro, Waves, Sinatra, Ramaze, and even the microframework Camping. Do you have any experience working with these frameworks? What have you seen so far that you really like? Dislike?

CrunchBase: Beyond Merb? We love Merb! McGranaghan closely follows the mailing list and is apt to say things like “that would be a perfect project for Merb.” As for the others, we are obviously excited to see/hear/read about the various web frameworks being created with Ruby. Sadly, we’ve only perused the occasional article. We’re still focused on learning as much as we can about Rails. We’re all about a year into Rails in terms of experience.

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?

CrunchBase: Unflinching Intern Rob has this to say about Obie and HashRocket: “HashRocket, ultra-productive in 3 days, is a definitely intriguing. I think every company wishes they could push out that kind of productivity in three days. At TechCrunch we would like to see if their three day game plan can work for bigger projects as well. We would still be going from concept to completion in three days but completion would mark completion of one or more features, not the entire product. Basically every three days set up a game plan for three days from now. Anything that can’t be completed within three days either needs to be pushed back or broken into more manageable pieces. It would take multiple sets of 3 day pushes but it would help by keeping us focused and on a regular release cycle.”

CrunchBase is the free directory of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit. It is developed and maintained by TechCrunch with the support of the tech community. Helping us out on this interview from the CrunchBase team are developers Henry Work, who joined CrunchBase to rewrite the site to its current version. Henry is a former team captain for the Northern Bites, Bowdoin College’s 4-Legged League RoboCup team and winner of the 2007 RoboCup World Championships. Also, Mark McGranaghan a student, developer, and entrepreneur who recently left TechCrunch to “graduate”. And, Rob Olson, Intern for TechCrunch and student at UCI studying Computer Science.