grantmichaels'blog

Part of growing up is becoming more adept at gracefully changing your opinion when you find out you have been wrong in your thinking. For the past few months I have been very critical towards things I’ve thought I understood about Rails and applied my frustration to David Heinemeier Hansson as an individual, although not publicly. After watching DHH’s presentation for Startup School, however, I’ve since corrected my opinion and re-categorized and changed the scoping of Rails in my mind-map. While I’m not positive that I agree with some of the “convention over configuration” principles, or any of them, I can now better understand the direction that DHH was heading in creating Rails. His business and marketing views are extremely pragmatic and I think if you are comfortable auto-assuming Rails as a technology for his presentation, there is some Zen-like clarity as a distillate from the presentation. In my opinion, I summarize DHH’s Startup School presentation to indicate that Rails is a top-contending framework for solving the problems faced by “Fortune 5,000,000″ companies. This, I can agree with wholeheartedly. I appreciated the candor and also a sense of humor I wasn’t sure I would have attributed to the Rails’ founder based on the numerous book prefaces and blog postings I’d seen. Sometimes it’s important to put a face and/or personality to an idea, and in this case, while not on-topic for Rails specifically, I’ve come to a less contentious perspective on the creator of Rails through his Startup School presentation. Rails is now categorized with PHP for my utilities, and would be considered in the scope of making smaller projects that would benefit from leveraging existing code base and libraries.

As for my aspirations to create the next billion dollar web appplication, and DHH’s repeated recommendation that the odds are some type of equivalent to my becoming an overweight rockstar in my thirties … Well, I’m definitely going to need a well designed strategy, and it certainly isn’t going to be Ruby on Rails given the audience it was intended to service. Has anyone else been watching Twitter as of late? …

This weekend, like last weekend and the one before that, I hope to get the Divmod stack up and running so that I can finally scratch this itch with regard to all that is Pythonic – Twisted, Twisted.Web, Athena, Nevow, Mantissa, Axiom, etc … I believe these tools hold the most promise if one is setting out to create something new and different, and where the scope of the project extends outside the web browser. Browser standards and rockstar-like mojo are at odds, so I think in my case it’s time to leave the browser in search of freedom from the least common denominator. In dropping the browser you at once free yourself from no less than 3-4 programming languages (HTML, Javascript, and CSS), and when you are programming at the advanced amateur level, that should make a monumental difference in productivity in the early stages. In my opinion, the HTTP protocol is really quite antiquated, and I think there are a lot of opportunities for the creation of cross-platform web applications that live outside of the browser and at once solve problems for the very same “Fortune 5,000,000″ companies that DHH targeted with the initial Rails framework. All networking does *NOT* have to take place via web browsers …

grantmichaels