The business of Ruby
This article is based on a presentation I gave at the recent Rubyfuza conference, which was addressed at Ruby developers. The title of the presentation was ‘The Business of Ruby’ – specifically because it was given at a Ruby conference. However, it had very little to do with Ruby. In fact, it had very little to do at all with any programming language, any framework or any specific technology. I didn’t write any code or show any interesting snippets, explain the latest incarnation of this or that gem or plugin.
I wanted to step out a bit. Get to a higher level and talk about the people that usually cause developers the most stress (and no, I don’t mean Project Managers). I mean clients. Customers. The people that we are ultimately building our software for. The real people that (again, usually) don’t speak “geek”. These “real people” never seem to be interested in developers fancy, elaborate code or their highly elegant software architecture. The people always seem to be more focused on the design and how easy it is to use the systems or applications that we build. Because, at the end of the day, you have to admit that clients are the ones that are paying our bills, so we need to satisfy them.
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Off we go! Another year of discovery, excitement, change and quite possibly some daunting challenges awaits our brave developer hearts once more. As we walk bleary-eyed to our desks again, fresh smells of coffee filling the office, it’s an excellent time to refocus – amongst other things – on our technical goals; how we’d like technology to help us grow, but more importantly, what we can do to help technology grow.
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* this article is loosely related to a real case but is primarily concerned with highlighting some principles about the value of great systems and well run projects.
