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.

A bunch of otherwise nice people apparently dislike Zed Shaw and call him names to his face. I have not met the man but am myself am acquainted with a number of people who are also otherwise nice people but who, having encountered Mr Shaw in the flesh, are inexplicably given over to calling him unpleasant names, though not generally to his face. I humbly posit the following, contra Zed: The simplest possible explanation for this phenomenon is not that everyone Zed Shaw meets is a jerk.