All of this focus on a Rails Maturity Model has me wondering, what about Rails or Ruby Conservation? How do we take what has been so good about this language that we are all so passionate about and ensure that it doesn’t get side-swiped by the brooding enterprise transition?
I went to my first Ruby User Group this evening and I’m still floating. I left thinking, “this is what the Ruby community is all about!” I feel like I’m finally getting it. This little community rocks! I get why Rubyists were outraged over RailsConf moving to Las Vegas. I get why Zed was so fucking pissed off in his ghetto rant. I get why Giles calls out Chad Fowler. I never really understood the understated awesomeness of the Ruby/Rails community until I actually sat at a user group and then had drinks with fellow Rubyists.
I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to sit in a .NET or a Java User Group. Do they even have those? I can picture it, though it pains me: lots of men in business suits, wielding expensive pens and dumb heavy Dell laptops. They talk in loud, booming voices, each trying to exert his own self-importance. They pretend to be interested as they listen some verbose mucky muck presentation, then they sit around in the office talking about their development environments and their enterprise software.
Tonight I sat in a room for 2 hours and I watched, I learned, I laughed. I had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. I watched an awesome guy wearings jeans and a t-shirt do a very informed presentation on state machines; he was even able to incorporate Batman into his slides! Then I saw a web designer give a whimsically animated presentation on Proce55or. And finally, a soft-spoken math guy showed us benchmark testing he wrote to compare Ruby 1.8 and 1.9. Ruby itself affords its community a level of intimate camaraderie that many languages cannot offer. It’s natural to get excited about and attached to a language that is actually fun to use. It’s worth promoting, it’s worth preserving.
When I read that Rails was moving to Vegas it didn’t sit right with me. And I’m not even a legitimate Rails dev. Despite the organizer’s outright denial, it certainly is an omen that Rails is moving to the enterprise scene, and apparently they have no problem pairing that transition with “steaks and strippers.” And yes, realistically Ruby/Rails enterprise should make most devs happy because that ultimately means more job opportunities and probably higher salaries.
But, it’s bittersweet, because I have to wonder what the community will be like 5 years from now. Will it be this tight-knit and this organic? Will a total newb like myself receive tons of help and direction from people that I’ve never met, just because I share a passion for the same language? Will there be as much passion? Will there still be people working hard to offer fringe conferences like Ruby DCamp, and RubyFringe as alternatives to the Rails whore house that RailsConf is becoming?
It used to feel as though Ruby and Rails was led by the open community that it spawned, but now it seems that the future of Rails and Ruby lies in the hands of a scant few that appear to be empty suits. I’m not naive enough to sit here and claim that Ruby shouldn’t go enterprise. It happens to all intrinsically good languages, in due time.
Ruby and Rails enterprising doesn’t have to be ghetto. RMM, for example is something that I think helps to setup a space for Rails in the enterprise world but at the same time declares it sacred. RMM will help improve the Ruby experience on the client side of things; anyone who has seen the horrific crimes that are committed against clients might agree that RMM might actually be a good idea. It allows a client to hold a few cards in their hand, and a balance of power isn’t a bad thing in a business transaction.
While there are people out there like Obie working to create a good space for Rails enterprise, we still need more people working to preserve the open, organic community space that attracted and kept so many of us here in the first place.
So, thank you to the people that are working so hard to preserve the “niceness” of Ruby and Rails; like the guys that organize the user groups, plan the small local events, offer help to people on forums, contribute to open-source projects, and to people like Mike Gunderloy that invited me (despite my newbness) to work on his project in order for me to get some experience. And a big thank you to companies like Intridea and other small shops that let their Ruby developers, like my husband, work from their home offices or coffee shops. It’s all about being happy and doing things the right way. That’s what I love about Ruby, that’s what I love about Rails, and hell no I won’t be going to Vegas to witness the perversion of something beautiful.
Thursday, 19. March 2009
Which is why you should go to *regional* conferences. Imagine a RUG that lasts a day or two but with perhaps ten to twenty times s many people.
Totally worth it.
I’ll say it again: Ruby DCamp in Sept ‘09.
Thursday, 19. March 2009
I’m almost to the point you are at right now, but I would still love to go to the larger conferences as well … and I do think that the larger conferences have their place.
As Evan said, I think that the regional confs are going to become the place to go, and then it will break down to the sub-regional conferences or the more unique ones that will garner the attention. FutureRuby really has me piqued, even if I can’t go because of money constraints.
Stick with us, Ruby is wonderful and the community is incredible, that is not going away.
Thursday, 19. March 2009
Renae Bair is my new favorite blogger.
That may be the first time I’ve ever been called “soft spoken.” I will have to relish this moment. (^_^)
IMO, this community will persist beyond Ruby. Languages will come and go, users will come and go, but the magic of people standing in relation to each other in a group like this is something that is inherently human, something that once you have a taste, you don’t want to go without. That notion is the impetus behind PROGMATICA, which is a language-agnostic group of software engineers here in Portland, Maine.
Thanks so much for coming to the meeting, Renae! It’s always great to experience the energy and ideas that new people bring to the community.
Thursday, 19. March 2009
@evan Oh, I’ll be at DCamp this year! Can’t wait!
@CLR hehe! First impressions can be wild!
I loved the meeting, and it’s worth paying a babysitter to be able to come out to it each month. Expect to see more of me! 
I don’t know what it is that makes connecting with other devs feel so damn warm and fuzzy, but I like it.
Friday, 20. March 2009
You might want to go to a .NET users’ group before you criticize the people that you imagine go to them. btw, why are you so excited about a language that you admit to not understanding that deeply?
Friday, 20. March 2009
@JP I have this idea in my head that people don’t really choose to be .NET developers or Java developers, they just learn it in college and fall into it professionally. Hard to imagine people LOVING it the way Rubyists LOVE their language and community. But don’t take it personally, it’s a silly picture inside my head. I did take several .NET and Java classes in college so I do have some familiarity with the languages.
And although I not a meta-programming, core-contributing, BDD ninja Rubyist, I have been working with it for several months and I’ve also had a watchful eye on the community for three and a half years. I have seen more people working together and sharing resources and helping each other than I’ve ever seen (or heard of) in communities surrounding other languages. With that said, I’m also only 27 and I haven’t been watching other communities closely. It could be that Java has a great community as well (or perhaps it used to in its earlier years), I wouldn’t know. But I’ve heard that Ruby and Rails has an unusually awesome community, and I’ve experienced that so I’m prone to gloat about it
Friday, 20. March 2009
I appreciate that you’re thinking about what the Ruby community will be like in five years from now. I think we share a lot of hope that it’ll continue to grow and flourish.
The best way to ensure that it does is to become active in the community and to help others as we all scale the learning curves to our goals. As you advance from new-to-Ruby status to intermediate status and beyond be sure to pay the help and Ruby love you receive forward. I think the Ruby community is particularly inspiring because a lot of the folks involved have given a lot of themselves without expecting much in return and have done their best to foster and encourage folks new to programming to realize that programming is empowerment.
I was really fortunate to make an online friend who was also interested in Ruby/Rails and Flex and he’s been a major encouragement and source of inspiration to me. I’m pretty sure I’d have given up at various points if it hadn’t been for his constant reassurance that I was on a good path. The social movement aspect of Ruby is really important.
I’ve been to RailsConf in Portland the past two years and while I can’t afford to go this year, I would if I could, though I’m not hot on in being in Vegas either. Aside from the amazing offering of presentations of myriad topics, it’s amazing to meet other Rubyists and chat in the hallways. In fact, I ditched several sessions and just hung out talking to people… it was awesome to hear about what folks were passionate about and hear about their personal projects.
I met the cool dude who presented State Machines at your meetup/RUG at this past year’s RailsConf and I love his attitude and admire his willingness to share knowledge and help out. I met a number of folks with this same attitude and that alone was worth the price of admission to RailsConf and the effort it took to get there.
Matz’s desire to make life better and empower us through a great language will always remain baked-in to Ruby, regardless of what “industry/enterprise”-types say or do. It’s up to us to keep the flame alive.
A particularly good way to do this is to start your own meetup or hackfest. We have a very nice Ruby Hackfest group in San Jose, and while attendance is spotty, the folks who show up are amazing. I’ve made some really great friends by being willing to sit in a coffee shop for a few hours once a week to work on my projects. It’s really all about sharing our knowledge and helping lift each other up.
You might consider finding a Ruby/Rails book that you think would be good to work through and set up something akin to a “book club” to work through the book together. I’ve found that to be helpful.
Also, you have my e-mail address so send me an e-mail and I’ll give you more of my contact info. If you have questions or need help I’ll do what I can to help you. You’re already demonstrating that you have the right attitude and I’d like to do what I can to ensure that you succeed.
Thursday, 30. April 2009
Congrats on joining up with your local RUG Renae. I do want to give you a bit of insight into some of the ’stodgier’ language user groups. Yes, there are lots of Java and .NET user groups and yes they do get a good deal of attendance.
Here in Phoenix, our Java user group is one of the oldest in the country, going back almost a decade. Also, no one wears a suit to a Java user group, except the recruiters. There’s always a few of those at every meeting. Topics tend to be much more enterprisey and usually not as “fun” as a Ruby user group presentation but I guarantee you, there are people doing interesting things with Java technology at those meetings just as there are interesting people doing interesting things with Ruby at a RUG meetup. Java conferences are also geek fests of the first order. Are people hacking on RSpec and Rails plugins? No, but they’re geeking out about cool VM optimizations and interesting distributed database problems. Not Ruby/Rails, but still 100% geek cred worthy. Some of us even play both sides. I’ll be presenting at this year’s Java One on 2 different JRuby topics. So Rubyists have successfully infiltrated that camp at least and they’re generally pretty happy to have us.
Do I prefer the JUG to the RUG? No, I attend my RUG every month and the JUG about 4 times a year. That’s mainly due to the fact that I’ve been a full time Ruby dev for almost 3 years now, so obviously my interests lie less in Java and more in Ruby. But don’t write off other communities. Our JUG gets more women every month than our RUG has ever had in its entire existence.
Friday, 20. November 2009
I just tried to subscribe to your RSS feed, but it gave me an error. Just wanted to let you know.