code is reality

I’ve written two books having the words “Ruby” and “Enterprise” in the title, that is I am really interested in “Enterprise Ruby”. Hence, I am very pleased to see a lot of discussion going on regarding this topic lately.

Nick Sieger, for example, blogged about his observations at QCon. He wonders why Ruby is not used more often in big companies, although he thinks Ruby already has everything it needs to be a successful enterprise software development platform.

I totally agree with Nick: Ruby and Rails are ready for the enterprise and it’d be great, if more CTOs would think so, too. And like Nick I do not know exactly why it is not more popular. Some people think it’s because only mediocre programmers work for big companies. I don’t think so, because I know a lot of smart people working in corporate environments. Guy Kawasaki brings it to the point in his great new book “Reality Check”:

There are a lot of guys and gals inside established companies who are as innovative and revolutionary as their bootstrapping, soy-sauce-and-rice-subsisting, external entrepreneur counterparts.

I think many companies use Ruby and Rails already, but don’t talk about it. This is really a pity, because Ruby urgently needs more success stories. But most big companies still have massive communication problems and it’s usually difficult for corporate developers to speak or blog publicly about their daily work. Too often they aren’t allowed to say anything about the tools and techniques their employers are using.

Fortunately, these politics are changing slowly, so be prepared to read more about some interesting Ruby and Rails projects that have been developed in really big companies

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am and is filed under Ruby.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.