David Hansson’s, of 37 signals, and the birth-father of Rails is in town for an Ajax conference this week, so he, Florian and I went to Sakana for some sushi (excellent!), and Ireland’s 32 for the meetup.
As I drove around the block to pick David up, I wasn’t sure whether to expect a Tom Cruise Hollywoodish aviator glasses movie star, a normal guy, or a mad scientist. Cool, normal guy with genius and enthusiasm underneath. Pretty much like his blog. We ended up parking farther from the sushi restaurant than he could have walked from the hotel. Lame.
In regards to Rails, both Basecamp and Backpackit use the latest drops of code from SVN, which means they’re on the nightly build. That says a lot for stability, but I still won’t touch non-releases, cause I’m not l33t like that.
There was a long discussion about the value of innovation, and keeping firms small, (less than 8 people), and a super-long discussion about the negative value of venture capital, and their dampening effect on ideas. The tradeoff generally being commercialization vs. innovation and agility. Obviously a one sided discussion, with Railers and Rails consultants in the room.
With Rails, it’s fairly easy to create a profitable business with 2 people (one UI/Designer), one developer. And there’s the revolution. Millions of ideas, both diamonds and dirt, come to fruition because a small, flexible team whack out a beta in man-weeks, and a 1.0 in man-months, rather than man-years.