This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Ant and Ashcroft 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. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

JDD chimed in on my post about Ant, and made a really good point that I think deserves attention:

The code that you write now far outlasts your expectations. My expectation about Ant was that it would be nice for me and maybe a few people and that was about it. It turned into more than that. It was a hack that turned into a wide-ranging tool that is in use by millions." James Duncan Davidson

I actually have my own little story from Railsconf along the same lines. Bradley, Martin Fowler, Deb, _why and me were having quite a conversation on Saturday night and at one point _why asked if we ever wrote fun (maybe he said silly?) software at ThoughtWorks. Mention was made of Ashcroft, a unit testing tool that I released in the fall of 2004. Well, the guy sitting next to Bradley (Maybe Chad or Jake? Sorry, can't remember!) pipes up and tells us that his team uses Ashcroft to keep their unit test suite clean. It was cool to hear that! Now I wonder was it just a big coincidence or is Ashcroft actually a lot more popular than I imagined?