This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Obie Fernandez.
Original Post: Rails Rails Rails Rails
Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)
Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss
Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Last July I flew out to California to visit one of the offices of this client that I've been consulting, a very, very big corporation that I won't name here. It was a short visit, back around the time that I was all hopped-up about semantic web and SOA stuff. One of the things I did out there was to give a short presentation to their techies about Ruby on Rails. It was well-received, but I didn't really expect much to come out of it. They are primarily a .NET shop, although they do some Python too.
A few weeks ago, one of the California folks, Carol, emailed me with a question about getting validation to work. We went back and forth a few times and she couldn't figure it out how to fix it. She told me not to worry about it, that on her visit to my location here in Atlanta I could help her fix the problem.
This week Carol and another California-based employee, Todd, are in town to meet me and my team. They are taking over management of my team. So we've been in non-stop meetings for the last 2 days, but this afternoon I finally got to sit down and take a look at Carol's Rails application. It was written by Todd in his spare time after my visit back in July. Until that moment I fully expected to be helping them with some experimental code. To my joy and amazement, it's actually a good-looking time and project tracking application that they deployed internally and have been using to generate reports back to Accounting at HQ. It's also one of the larger, more complex Rails apps that I've seen.
I was stunned for a minute, but Carol and I went ahead and paired to fix the issue. A little refactoring, a little explanation... Result: less than 10 minutes to figure out and fix the problem.
As if that little tidbit wasn't enough to make me happy, she told me that they were just asked what it would take to "deploy the app to the rest of the enterprise". In other words, the office that is currently using this app has at most a few dozen people, but she is being asked to estimate what it would take to roll this out to a couple hundred people at several locations! They're not even really part of the IT department! (LOL)
Take from that story what you will, but I swear it's true. In other personal Ruby news...
Last night I did 2 hours of Rails talk to about 30 people that showed up to the resurrected Atlanta Ruby User group meeting. That was after one week's notice and 2 years of inactivity.
My contract was extended thru early next year and at some point I'll be teaching Ruby to client resources that will take over maintenance.
The Rails-based webapp we've been working on here is rolling out to production within the next week and we're gathering requirements for the next phase of development.
Tomorrow I will begin rewriting (again) our Java-based product (tomcat, webwork, hibernate, etc) as a Rails app. Should take less than a week and the Java code will be retired post-haste.
Oh yeah, did I mention that I uninstalled my JDK a couple months ago? :-)
Finally, I am really excited about attending RubyConf 2005 next weekend in San Diego.
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