Derek Neighbors

The more I learn, the less I know.

Agile Ruby is Just a Bunch of Tools

By Derek Neighbors, Published on August 7, 2011

I have always liked Unix because of it’s mentality that lots of small tools chained together could be more than an opaque larger tool. In this instance. I mean Rubyists are a bunch of Tools not of the useful kind.

Maybe Zed is right an Rails is a Ghetto.

I had planned on writing something up, but seeing how these notes are almost 6 months old. Im going to just publish the list of thoughts instead.

Ruby used to be about revolutions and new ideas. Now it is just about tools. The community revolted against the status quo. They won. Then they gave up. I guess it is hard to be motivated to work after winning a revolution?

The leaders have disappeared. The second and third wave are just implementors. They are not idealistic. The Merb team emerged full of new ideas and a swagger of yesterday but all that died when they merged back into Rails.

It used to be about changing the world. Now it’s just about tools. Workflows are broken and complex. We fix them with tools instead of ideas. Regional Ruby talks are littered with talks about tools or non Ruby ideas. No one is talking about ideals and communities of change.

Where did the leadership go? It was great to see Liz talk about BDD not being about tools and Dan North pushing back on Craftsmanship.

We have become the drone army. We are losing.