The parent talks about the ignorance found in certain web development communities, but doesn't actually mention a single experience that he or his wife have had at any Ruby, JavaScript, or NoSQL conferences!

I, on the other hand, have *actually* attended many Ruby conferences (to pick one of these communities). I've attended: RailsConf, MWRC, LA RubyConf, GoGaRuCo ... to name a few. I was one of the organizers of Arizona's first Ruby conference (SunnyConf) and I know some of the organizers of other Ruby conferences).

Here are some REAL experiences that I've had while attending Ruby conferences:

  - I've seen a good (growing) number of female attendees
  - I've seen a female speakers
  - I've seen conference organizers react to potentially offensive content by getting on stage and asking the audience if the content was offensive to anyone (and following up by reiterating how open and accepting he wanted the conference to be)
  - I've overhead and participated in multiple conversations with men and women actually TALKING with one another about the community and what Rubyists do well/poorly to attract women programmers. I recently experienced this at MWRC 2012 and GoGaRuCo 2011. Men and women talking ABOUT the current experiences of women in our community. How could this *possibly* be ignorant, when we're actually making it a topic of conversation and trying to do better?

At my current workplace, most of our developers are young men. But we also have women and older men.

The parent thinks that it's OK to call out whole communities (like the Ruby community) as being ignorant. With all due respect, it is HE who appears to be ignorant to other communities. I recommend that he and his wife actually *attend* a Ruby/JavaScript/NoSQL conference ... who knows, might enjoy it!

ALL software communities should do what they can to provide an open, accepting environment to all.

----------------------

PS. The parent also calls out certain well-known, heavily used tools and technologies as being "horrible in every way" and "taken to be a joke by professionals." This is uncalled for. He's dissing every scripting language used for web technology. Either check the TIOBE or look at these languages yourself, but all of these technologies are fantastic when used properly: PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Perl, and many NoSQL (document oriented and key/value) databases.

Personal bias: I'm a professional developer. I currently code Ruby, but I have also professionally used (and enjoyed using) NoSQL databases (Mongo/Cassandra and Redis/Memcached key/value stores), relational databases (SQL Server/MySQL/Postgres/sqlite), scripting languages (Ruby/JS(CoffeeScript/Dart)/PHP/Python), other languages (C#/VB.NET/Boo, Java).

Wow. Microsoft really pwned everyone with this!

Doesn't everyone realize that Microsoft *faked* this crash as a publicity stunt?

Seriously. Who would download Windows 7? And, of those people, who would download it *legally*???

[test!]

A good test suite == "best practice to avoid digging custom holes you can't climb out of"

I work at a Rails shop too and, when I/we need to do something highly custom, we create it as a gem (or a Rails plugin) and post it somewhere incase someone else finds it useful. None of the plugins/gems I've released have required any maintenance to speak of, unless I've wanted to add additional features.

Be sure to write tests for your customizations (gem/plugin)! This will make it really easy to discover if your plugin no longer works for the next version of Rails/ActiveRecord/whatever it is you're extending.

[open source!]

If your changes might help other developers (they're not very, very specific to your product), open source them as a gem and let people know how to use it.

Not only can others benefit from your changes, but they can commit back too! Put the gem up on github[1], as it's the current de facto standard home for such things.

[rack it up!]

If you really need crazy performance out of Rails, look into using Rack[2]. Rails 2.3 (currently Rails Edge, will be released this month) *finally* uses Rack. Something like Rails Metal[3] makes it easy to return directly from Rack, letting you *highly* optimize certain requests. This is like rewriting some of your Ruby as C extensions to speed it up - Rack is really easy to use.

Good luck!

[1]: http://github.com/
[2]: http://rack.rubyforge.org/
[3]: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/17/introducing-rails-metal

I love my G1. It's more intuitive than any blackberry I've ever used (I've had 2) and more powerful than an iPhone (background processes, more advanced features imho).

In my opinion, the best things that Android has going for it are:
  * easier development
  * write once, run on any Android handset

Google treats Android developers better than Apple treats its iPhone developers. The NDA *still* isn't even fully lifted for the iPhone and you have to jailbreak your own phone just to run your own apps.

I bought my G1 specifically to develop for it, but I've been *really happy* with it so far, as a normal user. I can't wait to start writing apps for it!