The Viamentis Blog

Unless you’re living in a cave or have been celebrating the new year a little too enthusiastically, it is hard to miss Zed Shaw’s rant about Rails. Honestly, I am not in a position to comment about most of the stuff that is in there. I don’t know any of the core Rails members, neither the assorted celebrities of the Rails world. But one thing is true: Zed has made valuable contributions to the Rails community, he does make a few points which are worth noting.

His performance bugbear did a lot of good in making Rails deployment easier. I still remember what a pain it was to get Rails working with Apache2. Until mongrel came along. Briefly, fastcgi with Lighttpd worked, but it was never a complete solution because we lost some of the great Apache modules like mod_svn and mod_dav_svn. When mongrel came along, everybody enthusiastically embraced it, as it fixed a big painpoint.

So if somebody who did so much for the Rails community says it is a ghetto, probably we have to sit up and listen. His emphasis on empirical evidence behind the slowness of Ruby/Rails stack is correct. We cannot fix something unless we measure the extent of the problem clearly. And we should rise above our personal opinions of others to evaluate the solution in a community. I would say, this is the time to be gentle with Zed, fix the problems, and invite him back into the community.

That is not to say I completely agree with the article. It could have been much better if names were not taken, not because it destroys reputations, but because it makes the writer look bad. Sometimes, you have to let the problem correct itself. As long as the markets and community are involved, it normally does. I would say the article would have been as effective, if not more, if Zed explained the problems in an even handed manner. The community has enough goodwill for Zed to believe what he says even without taking names.

We love you, Zed. Please come back. Even if you choose to stay away, you will continue to inspire a lot of Ruby folks, and your parting shot will be remembered not for its’ vehemence, but as a wake-up call. Thank you.

Hi all. I know I haven’t written much in the last few weeks and not because I didn’t have enough to write already. I have been delaying a blog post because there are some things I should announce. Number one, Viamentis is slowly but surely converting into a product company. I guess you must have seen this coming, but I will have more interesting announcements pretty soon.

And probably disappointing news for the Lispers out there is I had to port the Lisp webapp I am working on into Ruby on Rails. It breaks my heart to announce this, because I really wanted this app to go production written in Lisp – it almost did. But there were some bugs, and in the process of fixing them, I was running into more, and not because of lack of tests. Lisp simply needs a kick-ass web framework to really shine in that space. It’s a great language, but I was re-inventing too many wheels in the process of making it web-friendly. As a single-person, self-funded company, that is something I cannot afford.

So, as we speak, the app is already ported to RoR, tests written, bugs fixed, and is happily running on production – it is not time to announce it yet, but I think it will be ready in a few weeks for a larger set of audience. Currently I am working on the feedback given by a few of my friends.

In the meantime, we have seen iPhone come and take up the world by storm. Ok, at least the geek world, maybe. No, I don’t want to write one more fanboy post about it, no doubt, it is a great phone, and more than just a great phone, as Apple fans want everybody to believe (ok, that includes me ). I never miss a chance to write about Apple – it is an inspiring company, in many, many ways.

So, this post by GigaOm kinda surprised me. I respect him tremendously. I think he has a very fun job – probably more fun than Mike Arrington – TechCrunch is nice too, but I like GigaOm better – it’s flavor and style is more to my sensibilities. But I digress. In the above said article, he posits that high-end iPod sales maybe falling due to the iPhone mania.

Let’s see. Head over to apple.com, and you will see iPhone adorning the frontpage. Go to iPod+iTunes menu. It says iTunes is “activating” millions of iPhones. Not iPods. In the section that belongs to iPods. Head over to Apple Store, and you find that the 80GB iPod costs $349. And the iPhone starts at $499. Hmm. For $150 more, you get what is probably the most hyped technology gadget ever, which includes a video iPod, a phone, with a kick-ass browser thrown in. It is almost a mini-mac. So that would lead you to conclude “duh! of course it cannibalizes the high-end iPods”. And of course, Apple knows about it too. It’s obvious. Apple has stated it before. iPhone is the best iPod your money could buy. Period.

Ah, I guess I don’t have to give you the link, as most people in the know seem to read her blog anyway. But I think her latest post is especially insightful. I have to agree. I have been using Rails for a while, and yes, it’s a great tool to build web applications is a snap. But there’s a lot of “magic” in there, where most coders don’t want to see what’s behind it. Perhaps you can’t blame them, because we all want to save time, so who cares about what’s behind the magic?

But it turns out that it’s very important to see your tool’s guts, and understand them. Because, at some point of time, you will out grow your tool. You want something more powerful, or something it does is not especially to your taste. When I first started looking at Lisp’s suitability for web development, I was bewildered because there seemed very few libraries available, and looking at how slick Rails seems to make the whole thing, it was as if I was thrown back to dark ages of web development again.

However, there was a cruicial difference – the language itself totally rocks, much more powerful than Ruby, I have to say. And much, much more difficult to master. Is it worth the time you invest in learning it? I have yet to find an answer to that, but I enjoy doing it, so I’m still sticking to it for now. And there were quite a few instances where I had to re-implement the tools that Rails offers for my Lisp web project. And it felt good to know what it really takes to make all those “magic” tools. Yes, sometimes it’s good to get your hands dirty and write your own tools. As Kathy says, it will make you smarter, definitely.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Rails getting a bump-up in it’s version number (I don’t read the list all that often now, it’s gotten too busy to handle on a daily basis) :
Riding Rails: Rails 1.2: REST admiration, HTTP lovefest, and UTF-8 celebrations

Looks like a lot of work has gone in. Has Rails reached “Plateau of Productivity” without going through the “disillusionment” phase? For me, it did. There was one time when it looked like the best thing since sliced bread, and other times when I didn’t think it was all that great. For me, Rails’ magic is a part of my daily routine now. So it’s new tricks might not impress me much, but I still admire it for the amount of chore it saves me everyday. Go Rails!