What is this talk about?

  • What is attracting negative comments about Ruby and Rails 
  • Picking programming languages is more based on Social things than on technical 
  • Evaluation techniques to picking up gem’s
    • Read README (Github)
    • Frequency /recency of commits (Github)
    • Number of age issues (Github)
    • Comments on issues & pull requests (Github)
    • Number and recency of tutorials/blog posts (Google)
    • Relative popularity to similar gems  (Ruby Toolbox)
    • Date of last release (Rubygems)
    • Number of questions and answers Stackoverflow
    • Opinions of work colleges 
    • Opinions on Twitter 
    • Hacker news/Reddit comments 
    • Opinions of outside developers (email, IM, etc…)
    • Recency and completeness of official documentation
    • Availability of books
    • Mentions on screencast/podcasts
    • Evaluate code directly (Github)
    • Evaluate the tests (Github)
    • Drop it in and see what happens 
    • Build on a sample app around it

What did resonate with me?

This was one of those talk that I can’t say a lot of it just because it’s says it all. The time has come that we should stop thinking about ourselves as Ruby or Rails developers we should start thinking about ourselves as problem solvers. Ruby can become a niche language in the end but who cares? There’s a lot of new languages to keep hacking because in the end I’m passionate about programming in general and not in programming with Ruby in particular. So let’s keep hacking…

Bonus: