In my little corner and circle of the world Ruby on Rails has been getting a lot of airtime. I first came across Ruby sometime in early 2005 and began hearing of this insanely great framework. For those of you who have still to hear of Ruby on Rails (or just Rails, RoR), its a web app framework that started life with the 37signals crew and has some strong philosophical points. It strives for simplicity and from what I’ve been hearing makes development incredibly quick which apparently makes for happier developers.
The thing that has really struck me with Rails are the people who find it. It seems to be special above-average people who find it, they’re those people on the edge (of the company or project or class or bell-curve or whatever). And then they rave about it, with passion. I’ve seen this trend with Rails a lot. That more than anything is what has made my head turn and start to pay attention.
We’re lucky in Wellington as we have one of the Ruby on Rails core team residing here. Michael Koziarski gave a short presentation on Rails at the recent Webstock conference. He presented really well (especially for a developer) and exposed people to Rails that otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance.
There are the beginnings of a Rails user group starting in Wellington. Head on over to the WellRailed group and signup. A few weeks ago there was the first informal rails meeting at Syn Bar and it was really interesting to go to. Two things really struck me. Firstly, was the sheer number of punters who turned up. I’d hazard a guess somewhere at the 40+ range – that was awesome to see. Secondly, it was really interesting to see that there were lots of people from all ends of the spectrum, not just freelancers and students (aka “the fringe”), there were plenty of corporate employees there also.
JD decided this week that it would be a good idea to start some Rails related discussion on his blog. He did this by detailing what his concerns with using Rails are. I don’t really know or care enough to debate those points or to have my opinion swayed wildly but plenty of people have joined in on the discussion which is good to see. It was enough to make Andrew Peter’s post the first article on his blog…
Kathy Sierra asked in her presentation at Webstock “How do you know when you have passionate users?”. The answer was when you have a cult (ie. the cult of Mac). A lot of the trends we’re seeing with Rails are very similar and cult-like. I think that’s really positive because we always need more passion in the world.
I’m going to get into playing with Rails when I get back from my trip in August. I’ve been meaning to do this for over a year but as per usual life got in the way. I’d encourage anyone in IT, from testers through to salespeople to acquaint themselves with Rails and just have a look. There’s a really good chance we’ll be hearing more about it in the future and it definitely wouldn’t hurt to be on the right side of the bell-curve!
