It’s fashionable, or perhaps inevitable, for tech communities to trash their competition…We geeks make arguing over minor technical points into a kind of art.
The most important point in his essay is a few paragraphs down. He points out that while having a competitor often lends focus to a developer community and that a rivalry can often bring about excellence among all parties concerned, it can also bring bitterness and nastiness. He wants to counter those latter things, and so he writes:
I think it’s important to recognize that we in the web development community do in fact owe Rails and the Rails community a debt of gratitude. Rails helped reframe the way we think about web development, and even those who’ve never touched Rails nevertheless are probably reaping indirect benefits right now.
So I think we should all step back from our personal preferences and plainly say thank you, Rails, for all that you’ve done to move the state of web development forward.
Rails was a wake-up call to the web development world in so many ways. In the short time – a mere five years — that it’s been around, it’s been responsible for many changes in the world of web applications:
Popularizing MVC amongst web developers. Yes, it had been done before, but never quite as elegantly or explained so clearly.
Proving that simplicity is a feature, whether it’s from the developer’s or end user’s point of view.
Pointing the spotlight at the Ruby programming language.
Driving a movement towards web applications with both beautiful and usable interfaces.
Reminding us that programming should be fun.
Reinforcing an important idea that we often forget: community matters. (If you’ve been to a RailsConf or better still, RubyFringe and FutureRuby, which takes the Ruby/Rails community camaraderie and turns the dials up to 11, you know what I mean.)
Speaking as a Microsoft guy, I too would like to say “Thank you, Rails”. While I can’t honestly classify myself as ever having been a serious Rails developer – it’s mostly noodling on personal projects and one major cancelled project at Toronto’s worst-run startup – I come from the periphery of the Rails community, having been an unofficial evangelist and occasional court jester, as evidenced in this performance from the evening keynotes at RailsConf 2007:
I take a lot of what I’ve learned from the community-building effort that made Rails what it is today and have applied it to my work at Microsoft. From what I’ve been hearing, it seems to be helping.
It’s not just the community aspects of Rails for which both Microsoft and I owe Rails a debt of gratitude — there are the technical aspects as well. I’m sure the event-driven desktop-style development metaphor behind ASP.NET makes a lot of developers happy, but it drove me bonkers – and also to PHP (and eventually, Rails) — back in 2002. The drive to create an MVC web application framework that treated the web like a first-class citizen instead of “like the desktop, but lamer” led to the creation of my preferred Microsoft web framework, ASP.NET MVC, and I cannot begin to convey how grateful I am for that. I love ASP.NET MVC, and a good chunk of the reasons why stem from the Rails-isms that found their way into it. I think ASP.NET MVC developers would benefit from getting to know Rails and taking it out for a spin – and I think the Rails developers would also gain something from giving ASP.NET MVC a try.
I once read a saying that has stuck with me all these years: “When you slice a blade of grass, you shake the universe.” Yeah, it’s a pretty drama-queeny way of saying that everything is interconnected, but it’s true in many respects, including human endeavour, which in turn includes software development. It’s an ecosystem, and different parts of it influence each other all the time. I think that the best participants in that ecosystem learn from other parts, and acknowledge those efforts that make the ecosystem a better place in which to live.
So to echo a Django guy’s sentiment, here’s a Microsoft guy saying it: Thank you, Rails.
This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!
(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)
There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.
I make sure to keep an eye on how technology pops up in mainstream non-geek culture because it’s a good way to gauge the techno-cultural zeitgeist and see how technologies are being received by the public at large. As techies, we’re all too happy to be early adopters and are willing to put up with usability problems, annoyances and extra work just to have the latest and greatest gear for its own sake. We have a tendency to forget that many non-techies don’t adopt technologies while they’re still new and need a techie mindset to use; they’ wait until technologies evolve to the point where the benefits outweigh the annoyances.
The current issue of The New Yorker has a Hallowe’en-themed cover that hints at how much smartphones have worked their way into everyday people’s lives:
Here’s a closeup:
(I’ll bet that at least one of you went out Saturday night trick-or-treating and checked your smartphone.)
The practical upshot of all this: the mobile platform is in your future. It’s the one that people take everywhere and it’s growing in power in leaps and bounds the way desktop (and later, laptop) computers did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
WinMoDevCamp
Speaking of mobile platforms, we’re holding a full-day workshop on Windows Phone development called WinMoDevCamp Toronto next Wednesday, November 11th from noon to 9 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga offices (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It’s free of charge and your chance to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone.
In the cases above – and I’m sure you can think of many more – you’re accessing computing resources in a very undesktop-like way: with only one hand, and even then, a limited portion of that hand since most of your fingers are busy holding that phone. You’re likely using only your thumb, as shown below:
There are lots of times when users are stuck in “one-thumb mode”. If you’re building mobile applications, you should keep that in mind and make sure you design your user interfaces accordingly. You might need to consider things like:
The size of touchscreen controls: make them too small and they’re not thumb-friendly.
The number of controls on the screen; the maximum number is dictated by their size.
Navigation in your app. Hierarchical arrangements make sense to developers, but lots of user experience people will tell you that ordinary people don’t get hierarchies.
Which functions will your users use most often? You should make those very easily accessible. Which functions will your users use less often? You might be able to put them on a secondary or tertiary screen.
Can you get information without making the user enter it? For example, can you infer information based on the user’s location, which you can grab from GPS instead of asking for him/her to enter it? Can your application remember your user’s most often-used data?
Can you get other kinds of one-handed input, such as from the camera, accelerometer, magnetometer or other sensors?
That’s a fair bit to think about, and I might have to present some ideas at the upcoming Toronto WinMoDevCamp (and yes, I’ll also blog them).
TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities, starting in Halifax!
I, along with the rest of the TechDays team will be in Halifax and places nearby starting this weekend and for most of next week:
We’ll be around on the weekend doing setup and rehearsals for the TechDays conference
On Wednesday, November 4th, I’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code event at the Just Us Cafe (1678 Barrington Street) from 2 to 6 p.m.. That means I’ll be working from that cafe – drop by and chat!
And don’t forget that TechDays Canada is also visiting these cities:
Calgary: November 17th and 18th
Montreal: December 2nd and 3rd
Ottawa: December 9th and 10th
Winnipeg: December 15th and 16th
Tickets are a still available for these cities.
In case you’ve forgotten the TechDays formula, here it is again:
WinMoDevCamp, the worldwide series of development workshops for Windows-based mobile phones, is coming to Toronto on Wednesday, November 11th! If you want to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone (the mobile operating system formerly known as Windows Mobile), this full-day workshop will give you the opportunity to get some hands-on training and [...]
Archetype have put together a cute little Hallowe’en pumpkin-carving application built with Silverlight and hosted on Azure. It lets you “carve” a pumpkin, complete with backlit glow from the candle, and send the resulting image to a friend. Give it a try!
To get started with Silverlight, visit the Silverlight site’ “Get Started” page.
To [...]
There, I Fixed It is a hilarious photoblog that catalogs kludges, jury rigs and hastily-improvised duct-tape repairs and modifications to everyday objects. The photos below are a sample of some of the quick fixes shown on the site, each one somewhere on the spectrum spanning “clever and thrifty” to “cheap, shoddy and frightening”:
On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number [...]
If you’ve got customers wondering if they should upgrade from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 and are looking for testimonials, go to Gizmodo’s article, 27 Takes on Windows 7. It features quotes from 27 reviews of Windows 7, which include the following seven:
You can learn about learn about SharePoint 2010 – the upcoming version of Microsoft’s enterprise information portal platform — at the inaugural meeting of the Mississauga SharePoint User Group taking place this Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Microsoft’s Mississauga office. Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp will lead a session covering SharePoint 2010 with a particular [...]
To celebrate the release of Windows 7, Japanese Burger King franchises are offering a Windows 7 Whopper with 7 patties, selling for 777 Yen (CAD$8.92 as of this writing), available only for the next 7 days. I have no idea why they’re not doing this on this side of the Pacific; I’m sure it would [...]
Platform wars are like monkey knife fights: amusing at first, but regrettable and messy in the end.
