Hope all of my readers have recovered from the holiday season. Here are a couple links I've come across recently, but neglected to write about during the holidays.
Zed Shaw, author of mongrel which is used by many Ruby on Rails applications, posted an interesting rant about the state of Rails development and the personalities of some of the major players.
I've never been a huge fan of Rails because I've never been shown a compelling reason to switch away from the more mature Perl equivalents. Lately I've been working with mongrel and Rails apps more and more as many of my clients have switched to that as their platform of choice. The more I work with it the less fond of it I am, it really is just immature compared to other platforms out there. Toward the end he mentions the Rails creator himself has an application that had to be restarted 400 times per day... with some fixes it only has to be restarted 10 times a day. 400 is just insane, but 10 is still very troubling. If the creator can't make things run better than that it really doesn't speak well for the platform. Normally I wouldn't link to such a huge rant, but when it comes from a major Rails contributor there has to be at least some truth to it.
My friend Stas Bekman has created a new site where you can make it known how you want a better version of something. It's called i-want-a-better.com. I think it's a great way for people to vent their frustrations with products, but I think the really winning idea is that entrepreneurs can peruse the site for new products and untaped markets. Hop on the site and let us all know what's frustrating you!
