From: CD Baby <cdbaby@...>
Date: 2005-01-23T09:58:27+09:00
Subject: re-writing CD Baby from scratch in Ruby, using Rails

I guess it's OK to tell the public, now, that I'm re-writing CD Baby
from scratch in Ruby, using Rails.

Announcement, here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6286

CD Baby is currently 90k lines of PHP code, written over 6 years by
me, alone, as I had no idea what I was doing.  It's ugly. Though I'm
still not an expert, I've learned enough about good OO design to know
what needs to be done.  Since all existing code is built around some
real fundamental flaws, a total rewrite is not just a necessity but
very exciting.

It's been pretty successful as-is, though, paying over $12 million
directly to our 80,000 musician clients.  CD Baby gets about 15,000
unique visitors per day.  More complex than just a store, though,
we're also one of the biggest digital distributors of audio to Apple
iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc.  Read more about CD Baby at
http://cdbaby.com/about

Rails expert Jeremy Kemper is doing the most work, up-front, and
Tobias Luetke is on board to help too.  We'll be contributing all
changes back to the Rails code repository.

Bookmark/subscribe to my O'Reilly blog at
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1841 if you want to watch the
almost-daily developments.  I'm going to be very open with the whole
process.

Feel free to ask any questions, here on the list.  (Use "CD Baby"
somewhere in the subject if you want to make sure I see it.)

--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby
president and programmer
http://www.cdbaby.com
email: derek at cdbaby dot com