RailsConf 2009 and the Danger of Remote Mob Mentality
My first Ruby on Rails Conference was a positive experience. RailsConf was in Vegas this year, and while I didn't win any money gambling, I did see several good talks and met some interesting Rails developers.
During the Wednesday morning keynote, as Chad Fowler was introducing Chris Wanstrath of Github, he asked who uses Git. Basically everyone in the room raised their hand. He went on to say that Rails programmers are like lemmings, which I think is a very interesting observation. It wasn't too long ago that most Rails developers used Subversion, and as soon as the Rails core team switched to Git everyone followed. It wasn't too long ago that test-driven development was an obscure programming practice only used by "Extreme" programmers. Now, if you are working on a Rails project it is a given that you have a decent test suite. And don't forget about Rest architecture.... people love Rest architecture.
After Timothy Ferriss's disappointing keynote Tuesday night, which served to entertain as the source of many jokes throughout the remainder of the conference, everyone was ready for a real hardcore motivational speech. Wow did Robert Martin deliver in his talk, "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby Too." No slides, just Robert Martin pacing on the stage and flinging his note-cards into the air when he was done with them. Being a great speaker, he had everyones rapt attention. He recapped a short history of Smalltalk and why it "died", and outlined what the Ruby and Rails community can do to avoid the same fate. This included doing test-driven development, professionalism, not being arrogant towards non Ruby programmers, and the development of more powerful Ruby Integrated Development Environments. He stressed test-driven development quite a bit, as I knew he would given his Extreme programming background. When the speech finished the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Everyone loved it.
At RailsConf it was apparent to me that Rails developers are a young crowd. I knew this before the conference, but seeing 1300 Ruby on Rails nerds all in the same room made it even more obvious. An analogy to lemmings is clearly extreme, but certainly Rails developers are impressionistic. There definitely seems to be a sort of remote mob mentality thing going on, which is a little disturbing. You know those Simpsons episodes where the towns people group together in a mob and everyone wants to kill Bart. Then someones yells some other new purpose and the mob follows without thinking. Anyway, the point is that I'd like to see Rails Developers and other programmers think more for themselves. Everyone's circumstances and project is different, and pretending that there are a few programming practices such as test-driven development that absolutely must be done to succeed as Robert Martin implied is absurd. I would add "Think for Yourself" to Robert Martin's list of what the Rails community must do to avoid the fate of Smalltalk.
At TST Media we spend very little time writing tests and have a weak test suite. Our lines of code comes out at 33435, and our test lines of code is 1811, a test to code ratio of 0.05. While I would like to see this improved marginally, given our current situation it is simply not worth trading features for a slightly higher quality code base, which is what a better test suite would give us.
