Database Radio interviews Robby Russell

Planet Argon’s Chief Evangelist, Robby Russell, was recently interviewed by Bob Zurek of the EnterpriseDB’s Database Radio podcast. The discussion covers topics ranging from our usage of PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails to best practices for developers and open source communities...

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RailsDeveloper

Sometimes you have to scratch your own itch. RailsDeveloper was initiated as an internal Planet Argon project, to reduce the amount of work that individuals in the development community have to put in to keeping up-to-date with the latest trends, tools, and best practices in the Ruby on Rails community.

While we agree that Rails has great documentation and a community of passionate developers, we never experienced the kind of helpful interaction that consistently solved our own problems. Developers are overwhelmed with a wide-range of options for soliciting for information, often times relying on trying keyword-base searches, which usually takes several attempts of researching, testing, and comparing to get ideal results.

For people new to the Ruby on Rails community, it is extremely difficult to decipher which information is stale or relevant as the framework is rapidly changing from year-to-year. Many searches result in information dating back as far as 2005 and might appear to work in blog posts from back then but doesn’t necessarily work anymore. This creates a lot of wasted time as archived information is often useless for people solving new problems. To counter this, people typically begin to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds from some of the popular people in the Ruby on Rails community and/or subscribe to sites which aggregate new blog posts from a larger collection of bloggers who write about Rails. However, there are always posts that are off-topic through this stream, which creates more noise for people to sift through in their busy schedules.

We wanted a tool that would allow us to stay up-to-date and follow topics that we were specifically interested in while reducing the irrelevant noise. Our own team struggled with this for years, and came up with clever RSS feed tricks to share items with one another from our various bookmarking and sharing tools. However, each specific hack required time to create and maintain.

RailsDeveloper provides people with the tools to help flag content on the Internet as being outdated so that they can help others in the community avoid wasting their time trying something that won’t likely work anymore.

We also wanted a tool that would help us remember which (rubygem|plugin|3rd party service) we thought was better than another or which solution we should look at again the next time we faced a similar problem, so we set out to build a better taxonomy for Ruby on Rails related content. RailsDeveloper allows users to share and comment on links, videos, and books, in addition to consolidating a community feed of blog posts.

RailsDeveloper aims to become the leader in knowledge about the demographics, growth, interests, and best practices of the Rails community. We want to connect people with the community so that they don’t feel so isolated. Many developers work in a vacuum and rely on online resources for growing their skill-set. We sought to give Rails developers a place to ask for help, and inviting enough to help others. We want to do our part in making it intuitive and exciting to share useful resources with the rest of the community. RailsDeveloper is our platform for developers like ourselves to collect, share, and recommend resources to one another.

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