Gears Within Gears

Some highlights, or anyway things that caught my eye, when I read the 2009 Rails Hosting survey of Ruby on Rails developers:

• Around 60% of the community has been using Ruby and Ruby on Rails for 2 years or more. It’s not yet a mature community, but there is now a reasonably large body of expertise to draw from in solving problems in and around the framework.
• Rails developers on average develop two to five new applications per year, and deploy them several times a week to several times a week.
• Most of these are probably small:
  • Generally respondents either self-host or use a small-scale VPS service like Slicehost (which I myself host this blog on; recommended.)
  • Respondents claim to be highly sensitive to the price of their hosting provider.
  • Most don’t use performance, uptime, or process monitoring.
• It surprised me to see that almost a quarter don’t use any automated deploy process whatsoever, which sounds painful. Furthermore, 5% claimed they were still using FastCGI+Apache. Crazy.
• The community has largely moved over to Git as the SCM of choice, although Github is not widely used as a centralized code repository—only a third claim that their source code is hosted there.
• Passenger has, this year, finally surpassed Mongrel as the rails server of choice.

I see a community that’s still youthful but is starting to mature. I’m still proud to be a Ruby developer, and glad to be a part of the community. Here’s hoping for more good years ahead.

Welcome! I’m Brian Guthrie. This is my blog. I think that covers the bases.

I’ve been sitting on this domain for a long time because I’ve had a hard time deciding how I wanted to host it. My original goal was to use my desktop at home to host the domain, because I don’t use it for much of anything else anymore, but my cable provider blocks incoming requests on port 80, so that was out. I finally ponied up the money for real hosting and I’m running on Slicehost, which has more or less the nicest signup page I’ve ever seen for anything, and with which I’ve been very happy for the approximately 12 hours I’ve been a customer. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.