I have had a great impression watching DHH’s keynote from this years’ RailsConf. According to him, although many changes have been made to the Rails codebase since he started the project 6 years ago, on the overall not that much has changed.
From the few times I’ve watched him speak, he always made it clear that out-of-the-box Rails is all he really uses or knows about. No surprise, since he has written the thing for himself exactly the way he needed it to be. Then a core team came along and extended it. Nice. Now we have people digging in for performance enhancement which will be seen in Rails 3. Great!
Its convention over configuration was never meant to be fit for everyone and every occasion. It will probably never be in the long run and I really hope it stays that way. If someone thinks they need to tweak a few things in Rails in order to accomplish something, then they should go ahead and do it and it’s awsome how most times it is as simple as writing a plugin or gem.
All the framework hype that we see happening today is way more than we will ever come to actually need. His secret to high productivity is not really technology related. It’s all about renegotiating requirements.
If you are developing professional solutions for the enterprise (and by that I don’t mean enterprisey) and you’re still doing it the hacker way, then no platform will look good enough for you. If there is no communication involved in your development process, then you will either fail or spend a lot more effort on trying to develop something.
Five years have passed since Rails was released. All it offers, plus all the other gazillion testing frameworks and gems, will be completely useless unless you take your time to understand what really needs to be done.
You client doesn’t always know what he wants, but he sure knows what he does not want.
He may come up to you and ask you for something that will take you two weeks to develop. As a professional software developer, it is up to you to start from what he wants and get to what he needs. Maybe you can solve his problem with a completely different solution, and one that will take you one day to develop.
As DHH said it, in case you want chocolate, maybe a Twix that is in your pocket is all you need, rather than driving all the way downtown and getting a 15 dollar belgian chocolate.
