MissingMethod

I spent last week working in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the 3rd largest city in the world. 17 million people live there, dwarfing any other city I’ve been in terms of sheer size.

So, I started wondering what kind of Rails community exists in Brazil. The Ruby on Rails in Brazil site is pretty sweet… a Portuguese replica of the original site . Ronaldo Melo Ferraz over at Reflective Surface is responsible for that.

The excellent Taggable mix-in (which I use often) was created by Demetrius Nunes, a developer from Rio de Janerio.

My far-from-exhaustive search on Google turned up a few other developers in Brazil, and a handful of Brazilian blog postings and comments. Also found this post confirming what I experienced in Sao Paolo: Brazilians Dominate Orkut, By The Numbers. It seemed like everyone I talked to there was an Orkut fanatic. They couldn’t believe I wasn’t even registered on the network.

So, it’s good to see there’s a community of Railsers building in Brazil. This week I’m in Argentina, so I’ll have to do a little research to find out whether the framework has made inroads in this country as well.

Back next week with more regular blogging…

Chris Petrilli has a good rant against Robert Mcllree’s lament that enterprise architects are fighting a battle against, well, everyone. In response to Robert’s argument that serious software involves more time and money than “agile” folks care to admit, Chris says:

If you deliver an “enterprise solution” in 2 years, and I deliver what you degrade as a “non-enterprise solution” next week, whose solution do you think earns more money for the organization? Who do you think abates the costs faster? Most importantly, who do you think learns where the mistakes are and the real requirements exist.

I think the last part of that is the most important, so I’ll repeat it: who do you think learns where the mistakes are and the real requirements exist.

I’ll grant my experience developing anything for the enterprise is limited, but I think the lesson applies to anyone doing any development of any size. You can’t know what your real requirements are until you start building something.

Sure, you can (and should) come up with a reasonable, informed guess as to what your application needs to do and how. But if you’re not prepared, even expecting, to have that guess turn out to be completely wrong, I think you run the risk of being married to an idea of an application no one really wants.

A chef may write out a recipe before he sets butter to the pan, but if he doesn’t understand it’s not the recipe his customers want to eat, he stinks.

I think there’s a purpose and a place for a plan. Without a recipe, we wouldn’t know where to start. But process doesn’t prove anything to the end user.

Kat Orland over at SEOMoz spent a long time putting together a really useful list of the best Web2.0 sites in 30 categories. It’s really nicely done; succint and well-organized. Check out the awards here.

Feedmarker  got an honorable mention in the “Blog Guides” category. At some point I’ll have to do a tally and see how many of the winners are using Ruby on Rails. I’m willing to bet it’ll be a disproportionately high number.

Cedric’s article on why he thinks Rails will never make the mainstream has stirred up a lot of responses. My initial reaction was the same as David’s: would I really want Rails to break into the mainstream?

I don’t think so. This isn’t just some elitist desire to be part of a special club (like listening to bad underground music just because no one else likes it). It’s just that Rails, as an open-source project, is fragile. It’s susceptible to all kinds of dilution and modification at the hands of people who might not care about it as much as the people working on it now.

Even with the Rails ecosystem at its current size, I think there are already conflicts that are tough to resolve. These philosophical debates about how the framework should be built could eventually lead to a split (or branching) in the project. And I think if Rails were to be adopted by the mainstream, it would only hasten those kinds of problems.

The beauty of Rails, I think, is that it’s built by and for people who don’t have to or don’t want to worry about meaningless process requirements or beaurocratic roadblocks. It’s built for people who want to code creatively, unimpeded by all the bullshit that goes along with “enterprise” development.

I, for one, would like to see it stay that way.

Related Links:
Jakob’s take on the discussion - he’s about halfway between the opposing viewpoints.
David’s post from a few months ago, entitled “Ruby On Rails Goes Mainstream” - not sure how this meshes with his response to Cedric’s post.