From: Steve Molitor Date: 2007-04-27T07:00:07+09:00 Subject: Using Ruby in a Corporate Environment ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Curt Hibbs Date: Apr 26, 2007 12:41 PM Subject: Re: [stlruby] St. Louis Companies Using Ruby To: stlruby@yahoogroups.com Cc: "St. Louis Ruby Users Group" Curt, Thanks for some really helpful pointers. Love the Spolsky essay. I'm sending it to my boss and our project managers. The two hurdles to using Ruby more at my company are convincing my boss, and convincing the developers. My boss is worried about the usual stuff: staffing, training, scalability, etc. You've helped me with the staffing and training issues, and we can do some benchmarking to test scalability. (Rails should scale just fine for our needs.) Surprisingly, while most of the developers are either excited or at least open to the idea, there are one or two developers who are definitely opposed to Ruby. (OK, one to be precise: but there could be others who haven't spoken out.) The objections are that Ruby is not used or accepted enough in the corporate world, and that learning Ruby won't help them make more money or more marketable (in the St. Louis corporate world). If corporations start explicitly looking for Ruby developers they'll learn it, but not until then. I'm not quite sure how to answer this one. While I do think that something is going to succeed Java, I can't predict the future. I can't truthfully say with assurance that Ruby will be the next big thing in the corporate world. It *might* be, but it might not. Personally I'm not concerned about what the next big thing might be; I want a language that makes me and my fellow developers happy and more productive. That's good for us and good for the business, I figure. I have trouble understanding the narrow, strictly mercenary and corporate focused point of view. Any ideas on convincing these folks? Thanks again. Steve Molitor On 4/25/07, Steve Molitor wrote: > > My company is thinking of moving to Ruby, and Ruby on Rails, in a fairly big way -- maybe to the point of making it the preferred language and framework for new applications. We've been dabbling with Ruby and Rails in one decent sized app and a few tiny apps. My boss is concerned about the issues in transitioning a mostly Java shop to Ruby -- training, integrating with the existing Java apps, etc. He would feel a lot better if he could talk to folks from another St. Louis company who have made that transition. Does anyone work in a corporate environment that uses Ruby extensively, or know someone who does? And if so, can we talk to you? > > Thanks! > > Steve Molitor First, let me just briefly mention that we are moving mailing list to Google Groups (which I cc'd on this response). So, if you could join our Google group and direct future messages there, it would be a big help. I can't answer your primary question directly (other STL-RUG members may have more direct information for you). But I can give you some information. Training is available both locally and nationally. The Pragmatic Programmer's Rails Studio (Dave Thomas and Mike Clark) is probably the premier nationally given Rails training. Locally, Object Computing Inc teaches both Ruby and Rails classes through Washington University's CAIT program (our monthly meetings are held at OCI's offices). And two of our members, Jeff Barczewski and Mike Sullivan, have formed a training company (Inspired Horizons) that specializes in Rails training. If you need to integrate Ruby with existing Java apps, then you probably want to look closely at JRuby (http://www.headius.com/ jrubywiki/index.php/Main_Page ). Finally, don't be intimidated by a lack of seasoned Ruby/Rails programmers, just concentrate on hiring good programmers (they know how to pick up new languages and technologies quickly). Joel Spolsky put it very well in his essay "Sorting Resumes" (the whole thing is worth reading): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SortingResumes.html If I needed to hire someone to do Ruby development, someone with extensive Smalltalk and Python experience who had never even heard of Ruby would be a lot more likely to be successful than someone who read a book about Ruby once. For someone who is basically a good software developer, learning another programming language is just not going to be a big deal. In two weeks they'll be pretty productive. I hope that helps... good luck and keep us posted on your progress! Curt