Warren Seen

… when job ads start appearing asking for unrealistic and bordering on impossible levels of experience.

I thought we’d gotten past this back in 2000 when .Net came out… but 3 Years of Ruby on Rails experience you say?

Mathematically impossible for the average (read: non-core) rails developer, considering Ruby on Rails was only released publicly in July of 2004.

They’re obviously very picky and so are willing to pay up to a whopping US$35-US$55/hr for all those Rails rockstars who were using it before it was released to the public! I’m sure they’ll drop everything and come running to apply!

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
Donald Knuth

Earlier today, I suggested that we should hold language and platform selection to the same standard we do with our code when avoiding premature optimisation.

The thrust of my argument was that, in relation to scalability, 99% of sites will never become so popular as to require scalability beyond that which is possible with Rails, so worrying about scalability feels like the start of big design up front.

We should aim to not be dogmatic about our selection of language or platform, instead choosing the tools to get the job done, so we can get something out there.

After all, I think it was Fred Brooks who told us to build a first version and throw it away; the inherent wisdom in this approach is that you learn far more by building something and failing fast, than doggedly sticking to a flawed design that dies a slow, painful death.

If I can return to the example of Twitter, I don’t have any references, but I think their development time was quoted at something like 4 months? That’s not a lot of time really, and therefore, it’s not a lot of time to write off in the case that Twitter doesn’t get adopted and turned out to be an idea that was DOA.

Happily for the guys at Obvious, this wasn’t the case, and now they have a scaling issue, but I bet you they know a hell of a lot more about their users and usage patterns than what they ever could have predicted if they had set out to design it up front.

Could they have not followed the same path with J2EE or ASP.Net? Sure, if you ignore the fact that they’re Rails developers and therefore are more productive with… Rails. They chose the platform that was right for them, that got out of their way and let them implement the service to see if it would even work.

Another example, Reddit. The first version was written in Lisp before being rewritten in Python - rewriting a proof-of-concept application (the cool kids call it beta software these days) into something that is “commercially ready” is not a bad thing.

I’m sure there are plenty of counter-examples where such an approach has failed, but I’m not getting into reductio ad absurdum arguments like “if your premise is true, then I could write #{compute_intensive_app} in #{slow_high_level_language}!”

When you first start using Rails, you quickly find there’s an 800lb gorilla in the room that no-one really wants to acknowledge. Yes, the ’s’ word: Scaling. Oh, they’re quick to tell you that it’s an uninteresting problem (at least for a programmer), if you do Rails right, and you’ve shared-nothing, then you just throw more hardware at the problem. That if you have a real bottleneck in your code, just rewrite the performance critical parts of it in C. Oh, and YARV will be here soon (for certain values of soon), so Ruby will be faster!

And suddenly, that gorilla shrinks; or at least it seems to.

Until someone goes and pushes the boundary way beyond those who’ve come before. Suddenly, the gorilla has grabbed your girl, climbed to the top of the Empire State and is angrily swatting light aircraft left, right and centre.

Scaling suddenly gets interesting again.

Nay-sayers and trolls cloud the issue
Those who for whatever reason want to see Rails fail, have grabbed ahold of the issue and are casting it as a reason to abandon Rails: “Behold, the savage beast that cannot be tamed!” Often, they’ve got their own agenda, whether it’s a desire to see their pet platform succeed, or to see DHH kicked to the dirt, these folks don’t really care about the scaling issue at all. They latch onto these issues not to help improve the platform, in the worst case they want to destroy it.

So forget them.

We’re here because we want to solve this without changing platforms.

It doesn’t matter to most of us anyway
The truth is, 99% of Rails projects will *never* hit a performance wall that cannot be solved using existing wisdom. So the issue is a non-issue and certainly not a reason to ditch Rails.

If perchance, you’re part of the other 1%, you should be thrilled to have this problem, it means your software has been successful! Fact is, you don’t accidentally create a site/service which generates 11,000+ requests/sec. You explicitly set out to do so. And presumably, you chose Rails for a reason. Why shouldn’t we extend the concept of “no premature optimisation” to language and platform selection? If Twitter had chosen an “enterprise” class platform and tried to architect for 11k reqs/sec, chances are they would still be building…

Obvious had a reason to choose Rails; they aren’t naive, they’ve been around the block with Rails before.

Generally, it’s much better to throw something out there NOW, and let the real problems come out in the wash, rather than sit in a dark room, worrying about what might happen and giving yourself a case of analysis paralysis.

Escalation Sucks
This issue has been blown up by a combination of strong opinions, incomplete information and folks from other camps pouring fuel on the fire. It’s time this “conflict” was de-escalated and the combative nature of the discussion toned down.

The situation itself can be summed up pretty easily

• We’re in uncharted waters in terms of this sort of throughput, although others have suggestions and maybe even solutions.
• The problem didn’t just suddenly spring up on the Twitter guys, clearly they’ve been working on it for a while - implying they’re now crying to core because Rails is broken for them is disingenuous. (In fact, the whole “they’ve forsaken that opportunity for an arms-crossed alternative.” thing smells like something of a strawman argument - I didn’t get that from the interview, so unless that’s come out of some backchannel, it seems a peculiar accusation to make.)
• Solutions that work for Twitter may not work for other Rails apps. Once you exhaust all of the conventional scaling wisdom, you start to move into application-specific optimisations. Are we there yet? I guess we’ll wait and see.

When the storm is over
This is a learning opportunity for everyone, but those who stand to learn the most are the core team and the Twitter guys. I hope each can continue to be open to the other’s position. We need to remember at the end of the day, Twitter are under no obligation to release patches, and the core team are under no obligation to accept them - I hope that doesn’t happen though, as the community would be the worse for it.

With a little hesitation, I cracked open the box, hoping that I’d gotten the resolution, colours and bleeds right. I had, they look excellent, if I do say so myself!

I’m the first to admit I’m no designer, and I’ll cop to the fact that the design was largely inspired by Dave Seah’s cards, whilst the loco image and ruby red was chosen to tie into the fact that I’m moving towards specialising in Ruby on Rails.

So, with new cards, I realised that the Wordpress template I’ve been using was pretty tired.

Time for some branding re-alignment!

A quick CSS change and a new header image later, here we are. I’ve kept the layout the same for the time being, I don’t want to sink a lot of time into a new Wordpress template as I’m thinking of packing this whole site up and moving to a Slicehost slice. If I do that, it will be goodbye Wordpress, hello to either Typo or Mephisto.

For the time being however, it’s steady as she goes!

Tasmania is a small place, which is why I’m surprised that very few people in the IT industry here have heard of Morfik, a Hobart based development company. Reading this morning’s Read/Write Web however, things may be about change there. As reported by Richard, slashdot are running a post about the Morfik patent which appears to be aimed squarely at Google’s GWT.

I’m in two minds about this, as I always am about software patents. On the one hand, Morfik was clearly first to the party in terms of public release of a JavaScript compiler, according to the patent they had a provisional granted prior to the release of the GWT. On the other, I have to wonder how this is any different to the multitude of language translation techniques already out there, or at least whether it’s significantly inventive enough to pass the “not obvious to a practitioner in the field” test.

But hey, this wouldn’t be the first patent to be granted despite the obviousness of it to someone with half a brain. I mean, thank goodness the patent doesn’t mention Ruby, I guess that means RJS is safe!

A little something I cooked up, inspired by Rails’ ActiveSupport Numeric::Bytes and friends.
(more…)

For when it’s just as quick to roll your own …
(more…)

Update: If you think I’m being arrogant, I assure you, I’m just trying to be assertive

(For the background that inspired this post, see here, here and here.)

Why are you reading this post? Perhaps you’re thinking of becoming one of my clients. Perhaps you’re a freelancer yourself, or thinking of becoming one. Perhaps you feel that I’m just an insufferably opinionated t**t with whom you disagree and are keen to let me have it in the comments (Feel free by the way, provided you have a reasonable argument, and aren’t just going to call me an insufferably opinionated t**t).

Why a manifesto? I know, I know, it’s an overused term, but I wanted to describe something of my approach to freelance software development, one which has been successful for me so far. I’m not deliberately setting out to be controversial, but no doubt I will be, and as long as it starts reasonable debate, that’s a good thing.

So without further ado…
(more…)