Railing against Rails

Ben Bleything (Portland, Oregon): This is my first RubyConf. I've been a Ruby programmer for about a year and a half.

I got started as a serious Ruby programmer doing Rails. A friend introduced me to Ruby two or three years ago. It always looked really cool, but I didn't have time. I was writing Perl for my job. Then Rails came out and everyone said it looked really cool, so I took it as an excuse to look at Ruby.

I was one of the first in Portland to adopt Rails, but that's not saying much, because almost all of us adopted it at the same time and got working on it. I started as an independent consultant with a prepress company that was building an application in Rails and needed someone more expert than their programmers to help out.

I'm not good at marketing my services, so when a fulltime job in Rails opened up, I jumped at it. Clients come to us who need a specialised content management website.

Over time, I've wanted to do less Rails and more Ruby. RubyConf is a good way to get exposed to what's going on beyond Rails, and to be exposed to programmers who are doing stuff that isn't Rails.

I really like web development. When I build an application, I can do it in a browser faster than I can do it in GUI code. But web application programming is not what I want to spend my life doing. Writing applications to support system administration is for me the ideal thing. There's a lot of interesting glue code you have to write to bridge between the content-based model that most Web development is and the system-level things you need to do. It's fascinating to me! I've written Harmonize, a Ruby wrapper around the Mac Cocoa Sync Services.

Most of the serious programmers I know who have started out writing Ruby on Rails get to the point I'm at, where the want to start writing Ruby instead of Rails.

Thomas Werner (San Diego): Ruby is a very seductive language. Coming at it from Rails, from a PHP background, or even from Java. You've seen Rails on the Web, you say, "This might be a fast, agile way to develop applications." So you start using it.

At first you're not interested in Ruby so much as how Rails uses Ruby. But once you talk to people who have been using Ruby, you start writing more advanced controller code, putting more Ruby code into your models, you realize how great a language Ruby itself is, and how easy it is to write really interesting libraries. You start writing libraries. I wrote Chronic, a Gem for natural language date-time parsing.

Suddenly, you want to learn everything you can about Ruby.

Posted by Jack Woehr at 04:45 AM  Permalink

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