One of our goals for this 3 week sprint was to learn new things. Whether it was ways to test business hypotheses, agile development processes, or Ruby on Rails, pretty much everyone involved wanted to learn something new.
Of course, that comes at a price. This video is about the tax we’re paying to learn something new, how it’s affecting our dev timeline and what we’re doing about it.
Bonus: Aaron authoritatively declares which is better: .Net or Ruby on Rails. Send your hate tweets to @AaronJensen.
Jan 17, 2011 @ 21:33:32
Is aaron falling asleep in front of the camera
?
Jan 18, 2011 @ 01:04:33
10 years .NET experience is pretty impressive considering its 9th anniversary is coming up next month. Now if you could only find someone with 10+ years RoR experience, you guys would be good to go!
Great job with the blog and the project, can’t wait to try it out once it’s live.
Jan 18, 2011 @ 09:02:16
I was including 1.0 beta, which launched in 2000
Feb 01, 2011 @ 09:55:02
I can appreciate trying new technical things for fun – at the same time, you should generally lean on the strengths of your teams. Choosing an unfamiliar language ( Ruby ) and framework ( Rails ) for the developers at the get-go means, every thing you do moving forward will have extra learning curve. Ie: Lets throw up memcache… how do we connect to it? Time to tune the server… crap, somebody pick up a book on mod_rails. Not that we don’t all do that anyways, you’ll just get more of it.
However – rails is an excellent choice for what you guys are doing. Once you do get past the bulk of learning curves, you’ll find it’s pretty darn solid.
Feb 02, 2011 @ 19:51:16
Fair, though one of our goals for the project was to learn Rails in a real environment and it was one of my primary motivators for doing this project in the way we did. A few of the other devs felt the same way. We may have been able to get it done quicker in a technology we knew, but then it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun or informative.
There was a steep learning curve for many things. I think you can actually see an inflection point on our burn up where we started to “get it” and things flowed much much faster. Well worth the experience and the risk for me personally.