Jeremy Durham

I read Zed Shaw’s post like everyone else in the Ruby community. I don’t subscribe to his blog, but about ten people I knew forwarded the article to me. Even people outside of the Ruby community forwarded to me. I haven’t read a lot of what people think about it, and maybe they don’t think anything. So, here’s what I think.

All of what I am about to say pertains to the Rails community. From what I’ve found over the last few years, the two communities are very different.

Mongrel was written about two years ago. Does that surprise you? Well, it should. It’s a long time to run dozens/hundreds of processes and manage each one individually. We need a better deployment mechanism that doesn’t require us to manage hundreds of little processes. We need one now. Rails lack of thread-safety in this case is killing people. That’s one of the main reason I, like many others, find JRuby so interesting.

How about documentation? I built a documentation site about a year and a half or so ago, and thanks to google it is well-trafficked. But, people don’t really contribute useful things. Caboose Rails thousands of dollars to build an app that, as far I know, is used but hasn’t really made documentation much better. People still ask me all the time about Rails methods, documentation, how to do something. It’s just not working.

People need to step up to the plate and solve the hard problems. How are we going to make Rails thread safe? How are we going to make deployment, and much more important, deployed application maintenance easier? When can I stop running monit, god, or whatever to keep my business running? How are we going to make documentation better? How can we contribute to Ruby, and not just to Rails?