Man. It has been a long time since I really felt like blogging. Blogging is weird sometimes. I finds myself being VERY busy and not having the time nor energy to blog thoroughly, so i end up forfeiting an entry, when i could have easily whipped up a couple paragraphs describing whats going on. I instead find myself concentrating on twitter or something else. Its pretty cool - but not as important as my blog.

Anyway.

The last couple months and the next couple months are all about travel. Its insane. It reminds me how much i love traveling, but how much I HATE flying. I used to love flying, but recently it has only been horrible experiences. I don’t know why it is so horrible, but for some reason - I have had NOTHING but bad experiences. It makes me not want to fly any longer. I need to work on just appearing.

After speaking at the U of A in Tucson, I went on to fly to San Antonio to hang out with Rackspace for a week. It was pretty awesome. We had some problems we needed to ferret out and Rackspace was very facilitative. I have always found it so much easier to work with people once you have met them and hung out. Then - the repertoire is much more than just the mysterious phone voice that tells you things. It was awesome to meet our team, flesh out our migrations and other various upcoming projects. San Antonio is a very strange place. I am not sure what i think of it.

After San Antonio, most of the Threadless engineering team flew to Santa Clara for the 2008 MySQL Conference. As always, the conference was great. I had a nice time and was able to see a lot of my friends and talk shit about technology and how to name hosting companies (It’s Mosso like MOSS. Not like mow). A couple of highlights from the conference were meeting and hanging out with Blaine Cook; getting my picture taken by Julian Cash; and having dinner with various engineers from MySQL, Digg, Mosso and Rackspace. The conference (like all conferences i think) was best experienced through the people who were there, not the actual sessions (although there were some cool ones - memcached, IMVU, etc).

Immediately after landing in chicago from the bay, we flew to NYC for a R&D conference with Insight Venture Partners (investors in skinnyCorp/Threadless). The conference was interesting. A lot of the companies that attended with us were experiencing very different growth that we are - so a lot of the sessions were not targeted towards small development teams. It seemed that they were attempted to work how we work, but through philosophies like scrumm and agile methodologies. Interesting to talk about, but it doesn’t really fit us. We were, however, able to go to some excellent places to eat. On Monday, we went to Employees Only. And then we went to the pretentious SoHo house. I found Employees Only to be awesome. It had excellent food and quite a drink menu. We also were able to have a really great time there. It wasn’t too pretentious and the people around us didn’t mind us having fun. The SoHo House had mediocre food and a weird vibe. My NY friends mentioned something about it being frequented by bankers - but it seemed more hip than that, but that may have contributed to the weird atmosphere. Regardless of the food and atmosphere, the view was great. After dinner, we ended up at 205 for a LOT of drinks and entertaining shit talking. Great times.

That brings us to the present.

Next I am going to be going to San Antonio again to finalize some of our discussions with our team. Then Colorado for Atkins wedding, and finally to Yamanashi for Hiromi’s grandfathers final funeral (and to hang out in Japan). A lot of traveling.

With this flux of traveling, I have become a bit obsessed with tracking it in interesting ways. For instance, i have been using Tripit.com and dopplr.com to track various aspects of my trips. I have tripit.com hooked into dopplr.com so that I don’t actually have to do any work. Just email my plans to tripit and BAM - dopplr is updated. pretty cool.

• 1 Comment

The other weekend, Charlie and I, flew to the University of Arizona to speak at their Thinking Forward Leadership and Innovation in Marketing Conference. It was a cool experience. The people who were involved with the Conference are rather intelligent and they really blew my mind in regards to their thoughts on Threadless/social media/Internet communities. They have words that I have never used that they use to describe the things I do every day. Weird.

The trip was hilarious from the get go. On a Thursday, we flew into Phoenix via SouthWest. That airline is a clusterfuck. I am not a fan. However, it is much better when we have “Business Class” tickets - which apparently means we get a drink ticket to dull the pain, and get to board a bit earlier than the others. It was a mess of annoying drunk middle aged women on a group trip, children and indignant and entitled business men who thought they were all that. We owned them all. Once we landed, we rented a very stupid car, and then drove the neat/boring drive to Tucson. Once we got to Tucson, we wrote our presentation (luckily Jeffrey has spent countless hours creating legitimate slides for us slackers to pilfer) and got on our way.

We had some awesome Mexican Food. Went to a couple hilarious bars, met some cool people, and ended up at a lesbian bar. It was pretty different than our times in chicago. ;) The night life in Tucson, near the college, is full of college kids. Weird. Being around so many young people was invigorating. And annoying. haha. GOD I am so old. OMG.

The next day we went to the event and spoke. It went over well. We got some good feedback. Like: don’t swear as much, don’t put up Obama 2008 slides and practice before we actually do it. I thought that was decent feedback. I think if we did it again the only thing I wouldn’t change is the Obama slide, and it seem that was the most offensive. Apparently, you are not supposed to be political at all on a college campus. I wonder when this happened? It certainly wasn’t like this when I was in college. Maybe at a “conservative” business school, things are different. Regardless, if I were to speak there again - and the political climate is the same as it is now, I would put the same slide up.

The other people we spoke with were amazing. Particularly Robert V. Kozinets. This dude is awesome. He has written extensively about tribes on the internets and burning man. I imagine that you have read about him before (even if you didn’t notice). We ended up hanging out with him quite a bit. Another person who uses words I have never heard to describe things that we do everyday. I am particularly interested in his work on Burning Man. I guess I will have to read it.

After all the festivities of the event were over, we chilled on the streets of Tucson, and eventually met up some of the staff of the Eller College of Management for dinner. The dinner was great, but even more great was meeting Sidney Levy. Sidney is apparently one of the people who developed the world of brand marketing. He was billed as the father of symbolic marketing. This is serious business. However, he was very much not serious business. He was awesome. Charlie and I hung out with him for about an hour, just talking about life, love and all things that occur between. Sidney was quite funny and had a lot to tell us. I am going to attempt to help him get his gullibility project going. Excitement.

Speaking is pretty awesome. I learned a lot from talking to the people around us. It was awesome to hang out with young people who are excited about something that I am not excited about. Inspiring and hope giving. I hope that Charlie and I get to do it again. Hopefully in Hawaii, or maybe Guam, or possibly some other paradisiacal place.

• 3 Comments

Last week my friend Mark pinged me and mentioned that I should get together with a friend of his who was in town for PYCON. I am always into meeting new people so I had dinner with Brian Dorsey. It was awesome. I was able to rant and rave about all my ideas, interests and whatnot with new and possibly interested. Brian immediately suggested that he introduce me to a friend of his who he thought I would enjoy talking to. So I was introduced to Anders Conbere. The reason Brian thought we should meet was that we both incessantly talk about XMPP.

Anders and I talked for a couple hours Friday, and found that we had a lot of similar ideas and thoughts about XMPP and its place in the world of social software, communities and data. Anders explained that we weren’t the only crazies who thought that XMPP should be used for more than instant messaging. He mentioned that some cool kids were also looking into the relationship of XMPP and social software. As Anders was dashing out the door to his flight, we decided that we needed to create or at least foster the growth of a mailing list to collect people.

Earlier today, Anders introduced me to Peter Saint-Andre who is the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation. We chatted a bit and then came to the conclusion that there needed to be a place for people to talk about their ideas, uses, experiences and what not. And thus social@xmpp.org was born as the go to mailing list to discuss these topics.

I have a lot of ideas and hopefully with the help of this group, I can flush them out and really tackle them. I am pretty excited about it.

• 4 Comments

I am finally recovered from my flash travel/party tour. Being shuttled around the country going to parties is a rough life - let me tell you. It was awesome. I met some great people and saw some really cool stuff. It was really cool how much overlap occurred between the boulder crowd and SXSW.

Startup people are fun.

I want to run down the events and how they turned out. The first was boulder. Boulder is a weird place. Seriously. It is strange. The boulder event was at this bar called the Foundry. I am guessing that if it wasn’t packed to the gills with tech people from the front range, I would never go there. It was a pretty hilarious venue, however the tech people really filled it out. So it turned out to be a great choice.

In boulder there were a lot of cool startups presenting. The one that really caught my eye was Socialthing. These guys are sweet. They are doing a very simple and elegant solution for the crowded social aggregation space. Although I really like the community features of their direct competitor FriendFeed, I like the design and interface of socialthing alot. It is great - and they are sweet guys.

There were a fair number of other startups, but unless they have real words in their names - i won’t link them. Just kidding, but seriously - there were a fair number of people with startups that plain didn’t have the best names. It is a bummer. Especially because the people were so nice and their ideas/technology seemed solid. It is hard to name a company. Anyway - some of the not so awesomely named but awesome technology and problem solution startups in boulder are:

Lijit.com - doing search for your blog. kinda like google site search, but with your social graph built in. Really cool stuff.

Villij.com - not my favorite name. The guys are cool and they have some cool ideas about recommendations in the social graph space.

I also met a really awesome “startup enabler” named Jeremy Tanner. He seems to do what I do at Threadless for various startups in the Colorado scene. Jeremy moved from Detroit to Colorado - so he had a lot of input on how it was going from city to smaller city. He had great things to say about being able to jump on his motorcycle and head to the canyons for an awesome lunch time experience.

After this event, I crashed at my hotel. Spent some time with my parents and was off to SXSW for ONE day!

With much insanity, I finally made it to Austin and barely made it to the People Powered Powwow. It was awesome. Hearing the experiences of Etsy, Timbuk2, Moo, JPG and all the other awesome companies was quite inspiring. It was also awesome to meet the people who are behind all these awesome brands. It was like a secret people powered club where we all tell our people powering secrets. A really powerful meetup. I am glad that Richard (from moo) set it up. it alone was worth the trip.

Some of the companies that were there that I really liked:

Styleshake - I was surprised by this one. Styleshake is a neat community that helps facilitate custom dresses. Another thing I would have never guessed would be made into a crowd sourcing enterprise - but it works. And it seems to work well. The dresses are cool and the variations are impressive. If I was a svelte young woman I would certainly check this out.

BurdaStyle - I thought this was the coolest idea i had heard in awhile. Open source sewing patterns. Taking various patterns and releasing the designs to the community to create and manipulate. Helping to foster the crafting, sewing world as well as create awesome clothes.

After the mini conference, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the JPG people and Wilson Minor (EveryBlock). We ate at some nice Mexican food place. It was good, better than Chicago Mexican food. Then I made my way to the soon to be bumping party.

The party was fun. There were a lot of people. Floss seemed to be well accepted and it was awesome to meet kid kameleon. Around this time I had the awesomeness to bump into a dude from Threadbangers. he was able to capture my natural retardedness for an episode of threadbangers. haha. Whew.

After my debut in amazing, I was able to take a minute and meet up with some friends. It is fun to hang out with Chicago friends when not in Chicago. I met up with Jacob DeHart, Aza Raskin, Scott Robbin, Andrew Wilson. Another person I was thrilled to meet up with is Heath Row. Heath has always been a favorite person of mine and it is great (and rare) to hang out in person.

After the party died down - we all went to the Pure Volume ranch for the Social Thing party and my trip came full circle. I was able to meet up with the Lijit, Villij and Socialthing guys. After rocking out there for a couple hours i decided to head home, sleep and finally attempt to make my way back to Chicago.

I barely made it. ;)

• 4 Comments

I will be in Colorado tomorrow for Tech Cocktail Boulder. It will be awesome to be a part of this event in Boulder. I will be officially representing skinnyCorp - so come get some swag and hang out! For those that have never been to a Tech Cocktail, it is a meet up style event mixing “cocktails” and technology. It offers a great opportunity to meet some of your local technologist, entrepreneurs and other awesome people in the boulder community. It seems that Boulder has a rich startup community being fostered by some cool guys - so it should be interesting to see what happens with Tech Cocktail.

Then on Sunday I will be at the SxSWi Party by Moo, Etsy, Timbuk2 and Threadless. Its going to be pretty sweet. Come hang out and drink free beer. According to the upcoming attendee listing, it is going to be packed - so come early.

If anyone would like to meet up (i.e. boulder tech people), feel free to send me an email or hit me up on a chat machine.

I will see you guys there!

• 3 Comments

Today I spent a minute setting up a Ejabberd Server for the OLPC Chicago group. This will allow all of us OLPC XO hackers to be on the same “mesh.” To get started using the jabber server with your XO follow these simple steps:

1. Boot the XO
2. Get connected to the internet
3. Open a terminal (activity or ctrl-alt-f1)
4. in the shell, type: su -
5. then type: sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.olpchacks.org
6. then press ctrl-alt-erase to restart sugar/X

Once this is done, you should start to see other Chicago XOs. You will know you are successful if you see me (Harper) in the community view. Please let me know if you are able to get on, or if you are having trouble.

Getting the server going was pretty simple. I was able to jump right in thanks to this awesome write up by Morgan Collett of Collabora. The install goes like this: you get your debian install primed, download the source, patch the source, compile the source, install the compiled binaries, edit the config, start the server and edit the server roster config. Then BAM you have a ejabberd server rocking and ready to go with your XO. The only caveat i ran into was that the config file from the ejabberd wiki page details using IPV6 because eventually all the laptops will be using IPV6 to get around. However, the server i used was balking at this - and kept crashing ejabberd with the MOST verbose errors ever (I.E. no error). When i finally figured out what the problem was, it was smooth sailing.

One thing to note - ejabberd is seriously business. Erlang is interesting to work with. I was lost for about 2 hours before I gave up trying to understand what was going on and just dived in. Then it didn’t make sense, but was working and I was happy.

It is really neat how the XO uses jabber to group people together. I really think that jabber is the future and seeing something use XMPP so elegantly is quite inspiring. I found one of the coolest parts of the implementation is how the rosters are forced to see everyone online - which i imagine is what powers the neighborhood view on the XO. This makes me wonder if this could be tweaked to create a more interactive or social networking aspect to the XO neighborhood.

One thing I would like to know about is how the XO uses the Multi User Chat features of the jabber server. I am not sure if the Chat Activity uses MUC to work, but it would be cool if you could chat with XO users with a regular user account on the jabber server by joining a specific room. I will have to research that.

• 5 Comments

I spend WAY WAY too much time trying to figure out where and how to host my websites. I guess you could it a hobby. A really horrible and expensive hobby. It isn’t a great way to meet friends, enjoy life or honestly save money. However - it prepares me for the awesome ability to bitch about hosting and to write this blog entry.

A couple weeks ago, Mosso changed some stuff and got my buddy Derek and I got to talking about hosting options if Mosso doesn’t pan out. I decided that since I have this perverse hobby, I should document my journey.

So here is my list of hosting providers I recommend and enjoy!

Mosso: This is currently my friends blog and generic client hosting favorite. It is easy to use, has amazing service and hilarious growing pains. I have been using them for about a year - and have been VERY happy with pretty much everything. They currently have some crazy billing issues to work out - but when they figure that out, I would certainly recommend using them. One thing to keep in mind: if you have clients, you can’t do any better than Mosso - they can white label EVERYTHING (including phone support). It is awesome.

MediaTemple: These guys are cool. Seriously. I didn’t really like MediaTemple until I hung out with the dudes. They are doing cool stuff with virtualization and easy scaling. For instance, you could get one of their horribly named (dv) servers for around 50 bucks a month and then if you ever have a problem with the resources or “scaling”" abilities with the virtualized server, you can just go ahead and “seamlessly” upgrade to a dedicated box. This is because their dedicated boxes are just virtualized instances as well as the (dv) servers. So upgrading the box is as simple as copying your server image from the shared box to the dedicated box. You don’t have to change IPs, copy your content or really any of the stupid shit that makes scaling annoying. Now this is of course in theory (and told to me while i was drunk). I have never actually don’t this. BUT - it seems like it should and would work. (if you can shed some light on this - let me know).

FDCservers: FDC servers is interesting. I can’t imagine that they are solid or have good support in times of need. Or that their servers aren’t made from ants and cheese. But seriously. They are cheap, support is good and they are FAST. They have some of the cheapest, fastest servers i have ever seen. Its out of control (and fast and cheap (what a good documentary)). I don’t hesitate to use them whenever I need a fast, cheap server with a FAT pipe. But - I am worried that someday their servers will turn to dust without a warning. But until them - they are my secret dedicated server host.

Webfaction: Webfaction is my new best friend. Seriously. If I wasn’t already married to an beautiful, awesome woman, I would marry webfaction. They have blown my mind. You are able to use ANY web technology you want to use. They have decent resource allotments and they are rather inexpensive. Especially considering they are expecting you to use long running processes like Ruby or Python frameworks or apps. Pretty sweet. If you want a host that allows you to host a wordpress blog, experiment with web.py, run a rails app and allow you to rock out with django - all under the same domain root - webfaction is your host. The secret is that its all proxied. So when you set up a rails app, it tells you the port number to run that app on. Then it maps that port number on the localhost of the box to /railsapp on the public IP. I currently host my blog and homepage at webfaction. I trust them more than any of these others (I am furiously knocking on wood you read this).

Rackspace: Rackspace is obviously not your general needs host. It is probably the best host you can get. But don’t just grab a Rackspace server and think your good. You gotta get the intensive support. Its like having a concierge service for your hosting. Its incredible. If you are a small organization, and don’t want to have to worry about all the nonsense that goes with managing servers, infrastructures, data centers - then give Rackspace a call. They have really helped us (threadless) grow and scale. They are solid.

These are the hosts I use on a daily basis. All of them i recommend. Obviously you wouldn’t use Rackspace to host your not often read blog, and you wouldn’t use webfaction to host your $100MM social network. However, all of these options have one thing in common. They all have decent support and they all seem to LOVE what they are doing. I can’t deal with vendors who offer products that they themselves wouldn’t use. You can’t trust those guys. You can trust all these guys (except FDC - with their prices, they have to be doing something tricky. heh. ).

• 7 Comments

UPDATE: Not a moment after i posted this - i got a mosso mailing that explained an upgrade in the plan. I will leave the original number in because i still think my point is valid and because that is what new Mosso customers will be getting. Their update is just a quick fix to stop us from bitching. It isn’t solving the problem.

I have blogged about Mosso before. I have used them practically from their inception (well before they were cool. hah). I have been happy and I have been totally pissed. but for the most part they have done an amazing job of doing shared hosting in the most unsucky way possible. The features and capabilities they offer are hard to beat. They have some quirks and growing pains - but what shared host doesn’t. But Mosso is quite different than most shared hosts.

What is really neat about Mosso is that Mosso is just a giant cluster. So your sites are load balanced across many many servers. Its how I imagined cloud or “grid” hosting should be. And it works. and it works well. You don’t have to worry about your small site being sucked of its life by a larger site that sits on the same server. every site is spread over multiple servers - so your site
gets the same priority as a HUGE site.

Its awesome. and super cheap.

I am hosting around 150 sites for 100 bucks a month. With crazy white label options and more features than almost any host. I use it primarily for hosting all my shitty domains and for hosting my friends blogs and sites. I don’t host large sites on there, but I do have probably more on Mosso than I should in one account. I never hit any of the resource limits and I was never told to host less. In fact - there are no limits to what you can host as long as you stay within the resource limits.

Obviously, I am not alone in this use case. I imagine that many clients are abusing their cluster the same way I am, with no practical repercussion and no way to limit them without drastically changing their plan.

I am guessing Mosso was looking at their usage and looking at us horrible clients - and figured that they were getting owned. So they decided to set up a new resource metric.

How they picked requests, I will never know. But they decided to bill based on requests. So each person gets 3MM requests a month. This is some 1995 shit. I mean - requests is just an annoying “web 2.0 cloud computing market speak” for hits. Everyone knows what a hit is. everyone knows that you can have a shitty site and have a lot of hits. Nobody uses hits as a metric. Except Mosso ;)

With Mosso’s new pricing, you get charged for each “hit” to a site that is hosted at Mosso. If you go over your 3MM allotment, you get charged at $0.03 for each 1000 “hits” to your site. seriously. three cents for every 1000 hits.

That means - if you have a horrible blog that has 50 images on every page load. And you get around 2500 views a day (which is a lot - but not unrealistic). You will use up all your “hits” for that month. But if I don’t have all those images, my 2500 view a day blog will not use all the “hits” up. Keep in mind as well that Mosso is a place where you are able to host an unlimited number of sites. So what happens if you have 50 clients, and each client is using around .5MM “hits” a month. You end up paying about ~$750 in overage for your cheap shared hosting. per month. Suddenly Mosso is more expensive than a NICE dedicated box from Server Beach.

I imagine that the 5MM “hits” is just a rough number they thought up. I am guessing they are going to change that number. Offer a couple price plans and generally try and make things better.

My concern is not in them attempting to make things better, more equal or for them to change the pricing into a more ala cart type of offering. My concern is in the requests metric. It doesn’t make sense. There are lot better ways to measure server usage than something that is arbitrary and negatively impacts the people who are building these sites. People who use a premade CMS like drupal or wordpress may incur more charges than people who are using simpler, css based custom sites. People who have sites that are heavy in graphics (graphic designers, ad people, agency people) will all be effected - because they are more worried about how the site looks and how it is presented - not how many “hits” each page view will take.

The whole philosophy of Mosso seems to be for them to take the much needed place of being a simple shared host targeting designers and other internet people who don’t want to worry about their hosting and don’t want to pay for a dedicated box. Someone who wants to give their client SOLID hosting, but doesn’t want to hire a sysadmin. It seems to me that those people are not going to want to start worrying about how many “hits” each page view gets, nor are they going to want educate their clients that the more successful their site gets - the more they have to pay.

I think that the “pay for what you use” model is the future. It doesn’t make sense for me, with sites that are using 90% of a servers resources to pay the same as someone who is using 10% of a servers resources. However, it should be something that is quantifiable and based on actual server usage. Not something that is relative to how your site is laid out and created.

• 6 Comments

At work we use Google Apps for our enterprise email and calendaring. We use pretty much the entire gamut of tools Google provides us. And for the most part, we love it. It is great to have an easy to use, inexpensive suite of hosted tools that you can use from anywhere.

Gmail is far better than outlook for our organization and the other tools just help make things go smoothly. We use docs quite a bit for knowledge share and even use it some in the warehouse for quality control and what not. its neat stuff.

Recently, we have been adding various appliances to our organization that can authenticate users based on an LDAP data store or a Radius server.

It started with one of out file servers. I wanted to make it so people have their own share for archiving and backing up personal documents. A place that is “protected” by their password. But with 35 employees possibly accessing the file server, it is not efficient to have another ACL system. So ultimately it would be nice to have it use Google Apps as authentication portion.

I googled a bunch and forgot that this was a goal. Until this last month when we added an awesome wifi mesh system (Aerohive - hit me up if you want hooked up with them, awesome stuff) and we grabbed a MUCH better VPN subsystem (Juniper SSLVPN). Both require user auth to work most securely. Which means that in the best case, both would authenticate to the same ACL system that the file server is authenticating against.

Once again, the problem of integrating Google Apps accounts into an LDAP/Radius service was brought to my attention. It seems like it should be something that is relatively easy to integrate. However, I can’t quite grasp the SAML offering that the Google Apps API suggests using for SSO. I couldn’t easily figure out if this would be an option for web only authentication, or I could drop it into a freeradius module (using rlm_python). It also seems that it is a way to use a radius server to authenticate a local user into their Google Apps account. Not the direction that I want. It seems like this should be possible, but i wasn’t able to find any help on the various Google Groups that suggested that it possible.

I got to thinking. If I am going to be hacking away at a python module for freeradius or using pyrad to create a radius server - why couldn’t I just have it authenticate against Google Apps jabber server. Basically using XMPPPY or whatever to hit talk.google.com and check if a user is authenticating correctly, and if so let them in.

The immediate benefit of piggy backing on Google’s jabber server is that I would be able to bypass managing user accounts or passwords. They would be managed by the users themselves or by whoever is managing the user accounts. It would be independent of the Radius server.

Some immediate problems are that all the users would immediately have the same access. If I wanted more granularity of access, I would obviously have to create some ACL system that sat between the XMPP auth and the response to the radius request.

I am guessing that figuring out if SAML would work would be easiest. I can already tell this is possibly a backwards way of doing it. I just want everything to work well together. And I want to haxor up some python.

• 1 Comment

Apparently I am in the March Wired magazine. I am not sure exactly what the title of the article or the exact content - but I was interview about my views on the rails community as someone who left the community and moved on to other things. (I think - I haven’t seen it - just heard that i was in it.)

My history with rails is a tumultuous one. I first played with rails pre 1.0 while working with my buddy Andy Carlson. In a flurry of excited and hilarious programming, I learned ruby and started building web applications in rails. It was a brilliant time. I enjoyed the layout and structure of the applications. I enjoyed the beauty of the Ruby language. Probably most of all, I enjoyed the excitement of learning a new framework and language. One of the things I did - was recreate a couple apps I had written in php. The development time was LOADs faster than the time the same app took to write in PHP. Blew my mind.

Suddenly I was a rails advocate. I advocated Seth Godin use rails for his Squidoo project (he used PHP - I guess I wasn’t convincing enough, but he employs a great PHP guy, so no worries). I ended up teaching Rails to Greg Narain (who now has a rails consultant firm) and I eventually even brought up using rails at skinnyCorp. Right about the time I got turned down to use rails at skinnyCorp (right when I started. hah), I started to notice that any time my rails sites got traffic, they would crash. Then, the upgrade to post 1.0 rails code killed all my rails apps. So I made the sad decision to move a lot of them back to PHP. My servers stopped groaning, I didn’t have problems with an upgrade path - but I was bummed because I didn’t have a good rake.

Since I was doing PHP full time around this time period, I started trying to move what I learned from rails into our PHP work. I was probably 100% a better coder because of ruby and rails. I was a staunch MVC layout supporter. I was very against procedural PHP in our apps and I fought to the death to try and get all my apps (including skinnyCorps) to have a layout and framework that created a rapid development environment and made sense. (luckily I had the help of Kanno to work this out. He totally helped). For inspiration and education I continued to read various rails blogs and started paying attention to other framework projects - django, cakephp to name my favorites. While dabbling in these other communities i started to notice how negative the rails community was.

This is what I talked to the wired writer about.

I hate how hard it is to get around in the rails community. From sitting on IRC and mentioning that I use php and then having a flame war erupt, to having to defend various non rails design patterns to every n00b out there who doesn’t know who Martin Fowler is. It was draining. And to tell you the truth, that is the primary reason that when I left rails - I never came back. In my experience learning other languages, and other frameworks - I never once heard “omg. you are totally doing it WRONG.” Only while working with the rails community did I ever hear that. and I heard it often. and from the rails leaders.

I have blogged about this before.

I think that the rails leaders are killing the rails community. I don’t think zed was entirely correct - but I do think he had some great points. But I have been out of it for a minute, so I can’t really speak for recent events. But I see what the intraweb sees. And I see a community who is lead by people who are negative, rather mean and not willing to accept criticism at all. But then again, who is able to easily accept criticism and when they are criticized, how should they respond?

I have no idea. But for me, I would have liked any reaction that wasn’t snarky, soapboxy and that solved the problem - because there are problems and telling people they are wrong is not going to solve them. I think the rails community should probably watch this video. They should think before they post. They should abandon their emotions when talking about programming and technology. They should get girlfriends. Just kidding - all the rails coders I know have hot girlsfriends/wives (which probably exacerbates the annoyance when they are dicks online).

Anyway. Since I live in a glass house and all, I am going to go outside and see if I can’t find the new wired. Hopefully I don’t look like a dick in it.

• 3 Comments