Ok Ok, I know it’s a silly title for this blog post, considering that many people do see Rails and Ruby followers as cult members, and Matz and DHH as their leader and saviour. To be fair, DHH and Matz did pave the way for thousands of happy developers. But for the most part Rubyists and Rails developers are just enjoying challenging, fun and usually liberating coding careers. It doesn’t usually get all hokey and cultish, save for the hotel hallways and lobbies during seances, er, conferences.

I’m talking about all of this because of the #rmm (rails maturity model) proposed by Obie Fernandez, of Hashrocket. You can read about it here. Let me preface all of this by saying that I’ve met Obie briefly, have read about him extensively, and I think he’s BRILLIANT as fuck and he runs the best damn dev shop I’ve ever heard of. Hashrocket has it down. They’re like ENTP with flair. With that said, I’ll continue.

Obie grew up in a cult (ironically, so did I). He was a Jehovah’s Witness (as explained in his blog post, Becoming a Worldly Person). Anyone who looks at the way Obie runs Hashrocket can clearly tell that his background of growing up in an extremist religion has an influence over the way he runs a business in a very positive way. Hashrocket even has a gang symbol. And it’s fucking awesome. Best company logo EVAR. Two of their employees even had the gang symbol tattooed, that’s how intense this whole thing is.

But the point I want to make is that we should approach Obie’s plans for masterminding the Rails world with caution. Although I think he’s smart as hell and his ideas come from a truly good place, he is a bit of a cult icon and that in and of itself can be terrifying. I hate to be ruled, and I hate to follow. I would hate to be governed as a developer in such a way that I had to adhere to someone else’s set of coding standards just to be successful or on equal footing. Although many people agree on a set of “best practices,” most people can also agree that best practices are not always the best solution.

I was relieved to hear that DHH did not support Obie’s plan for a RMM and in his words, “I would not be supporting a “RMM”, which btw should rather be called “Hashrocket/Obie’s/People-who-agree-with-them-or-him’s Maturity Model for people using Rails”. 

There will always be inept developers in any language. But we have to trust that when a developer sucks someone will tell him so. And hopefully that someone will then offer some guidance, take some time out of his/her life to mentor a newer developer.

The Rails community is what drew many of us into the Rails world in the first place. There’s no better community to be in. So let’s keep it open. Let’s allow the evangelists and happy coders to do their community work and stop trying to look for a revolution. Rails WAS the revolution. Let’s just enjoy it. For fuck sake, you’re not coding in Java, just shut up and smile about it. Rails does not need a leader to step up and create a revolution. Unlike the global economy, Rails is not falling apart. We don’t need a saviour yet. But perhaps we can keep Obie in our back pocket for when we do, since he would make a damn good one.