Los Angeles Ruby Feburary Meetup Recap at UCLA
Published: February 20th, 2009Great Ruby meetup in Februrary in Los Angeles with Yehuda Katz giving a talk on Rails/Merb merge and more goodies.
A Quick History
It’s interesting to see how the Ruby group evolved since the first meetup I went to over two years ago. The first meetup was about 8 people that got together at a book store in Santa Monica; the only person I really remember is Michael Fairchild. Coincidentally he actually helped organize the meetup at UCLA (Thanks Michael!). It’s nice to see a meetup that essentially died at 8 people, to be revived two years later with an attendance of over 80 Rubyists.
This means a lot to what is going on in Los Angeles, and the Ruby community in general. It’s amazing to witness the growth of a community.
The Meetup!
To the business, let’s talk about the meetup. The first talk was given by James Foster from Gemstone1. Cool stuff, MagLev, Smalltalk, Seaside, but nothing I have not seen before. What was really intrigued me is the talk that Yehuda Katz made. You should know Yehuda. Why? Well, he’s done a lot of work on jQuery and Merb. He is also part of the Engineyard2 team. He introduced his talk with a “history” of Rails3. Why is Rails the way it is? How did it come around? And honestly, it was immensely intriguing. He went way back in 2004 when it was barley getting any hype. The point of showing the history was to see how Yehuda came to the conclusion that Merb4 should merge with Rails.
It’s History Time!
In summary of the talk, it basically came down to Merb and Rails sharing common goals but different priorities. That’s what made Rails the way it was in December 08, and that’s what made Merb the way it was in December 08. Rails has been built since it’s infancy under the “80/20 rule”, convention over configuration, and you know the rest. Merb evolved over the ideas of speed, modularity, and being light-weight.
Yehuda always said “no” to ideas of merging with Rails until a fateful night in December when he talked to DHH. After talking together they came to the conclusion that Rails and Merb truly do share the same goals, yet different priorities. An example that was brought up was how the “respond_to” api was a huge priority for the Rails team, and Yehuda extremely disagrees with that priority, he rather see a “1000″ millisecond increase of speed on a request. When you take the priorities into the mix, and the differences aside, DHH and Yehuda came to the conclusion that Merb and Rails should merge. Alas, January 2009 you hear the announcement.
Full Time?!?!
I don’t know if others know this, but I learned from Yehuda’s presentation that until this merge/agreement with Engineyard, Rails never had a full-time person on the core team. The Ruby on Rails core team now has two full-time developers as part of the agreement between DHH/Yehuda/Engineyard. I find this fascinating and really interesting to see what this does to Ruby on Rails’ growth cycle.
I’m really glad to see the minds that we have working on the Rails core team. It gives the project a strong future and it’s amazing to see it evolve a long the way.
PS
One other thing that I want to share that Yehuda shared with us, is that a major focus for Rails 3 is going to be internal API’s. For example, plugins: extra functionality is essentially monkey-patched. To think of the day we no longer have to monkey-patch our plugins and easily just plug-in to rails internals? Imagine Datamapper5 being able to work as an ORM without having to hack the hell out of Rails through monkeying around. Amazing! I can’t wait for it! Kudos to the Rails team and here’s to a strong year of coding!
Oh, one last thing. We had a surprise appearance by Jim Weirich. You should know who he is.
Overall, a great meetup. I enjoyed my history lesson on Rails and Merb. I enjoyed the abundant attendance, and hope to see you all at the next one! Take a look at Ron Evan’s take on the meetup – he may have seen things differently than me.
Ready. Set. Go.
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