One of the emerging benefits of attending a
Rails Studio is membership in the
Studio mailing list. The posts in that list are consistently on target.
A few weeks back, Eric
Knapp posted a long message which I feel nicely sums up the difference
Rails makes. It isn’t an issue of Rails being substantially different
to the alternatives. It’s more that the lowered barriers to entry
enable a broader base of people to benefit.
Anyway, with Eric’s permission, here’s the body of his post. It
was titled
Rails is more than I thought
This past Friday I had a meeting with a client who is the director of
educational research and IT at a medium sized public school district.
I’m sure that you are all aware that school districts are under
intense pressure to cut their budgets and expenses. My client can no longer
replace any IT employee when someone leaves. They are down to one network
administrator (!) and two programmers. Their programmers are just
maintaining an old legacy system and really don’t do any new
development anymore. New development is done by student interns from my
Java program at my college. My students really struggle with all kinds of
limits that are set by the district’s policies, procedures, and
equipment.
My client has also been struggling with how to move to the future. He
is under lots of pressure to cut even more deeply. There are those within
the district who want to end all development of new things and only use
off-the-shelf applications, as-is, with no customization.
My client is not an IT person and he knows nothing about programming.
But, he is a very smart man and is very perceptive. My meeting started with
an overview of his current development efforts with my students. Then I
started sharing rails with him. I like rails and I tend to be enthusiastic.
About ten minutes into my presentation he interrupted me and said,
"So, this could save my IT department, couldn’t it?"
I was really taken off guard by this! I simply answered,
"Yes." He took over our meeting and started talking about all the
things that he and his people would like to do, but just can’t
afford. He talked about all the ideas that are shared with him by his staff
and teachers that also are just too expensive. My interns have started to
help him and we have worked very hard at trying to bring Java to his
department. But, they are just too slow, everything takes too long to be
viable anymore. I believe that we are now going to give up on Java.
We now have scheduled a kick-off meeting for maybe bringing Ruby on
Rails to this school district. Later he told me that this has given him a
little bit of hope. I might be able to have good geek fun while helping
children at the same time.
This is exciting stuff! Rails appears to have reached some sort of
critical mass of productivity where ideas that live in the hearts and minds
of most people have a chance of getting out and onto the screen. I’m
starting to ask students and friends what those ideas are. I am getting
really interesting answers.
I hope I’m not making too much of this, there is still lots of
work to be done and we will have to get grants to do it. But, there are
possibilities now where there weren’t any. There is a little bit of
hope. Sounds good to me. Many thanks to the rails community and to this
group for helping me get to this point.
