Talk notes – Sneaking Ruby & Rails into big companies

I didn’t have the chance to attend the Rails Underground conference which took place in July 2009 in London. But fortunately some of the slides and videos of the talks can be found online. One talk caught my attention in particular: Sneaking Ruby & Rails into big companies by Maik Schmidt. Working for a big company (vodafone), he managed to apply Ruby and Rails for some projects he was working on.

In this post, I would like to recap some of the interesting points he made. He listed some areas in which Ruby and also Ruby on Rails could be applied:

  • automate deployment tasks (with Ruby)
  • create a regression testing tool (with Ruby and/or Rails)
  • web application for internal use (with Ruby on Rails)
  • create a REST service (with Sinatra)
  • build prototypes blazingly fast (with Ruby on Rails)
  • integrate legacy applications with each other (using Ruby)

I would actually mention automation in a more general sense here whereby I mean any repetitive and cumbersome task that can be simplified and automated. And note that these areas are not only suitable for Ruby/Rails but could be used to introduce any new techonlogy or paradigm in an existing organisation.

Maik then reminds us that Ruby is a full-blown programming language and could be used for pretty much anything. Also, sometimes there is no need to create a Web2.0 interface for every existing legacy application. In fact, a terminal application could for instance be embedded in a web browser without loosing its look and feel (green text on black background which is operated by the keyboard).

Another general recommendation is to focus on a higher level of abstraction, hence instead of introducing techonlogies, try to adopt techniques:

As many enterprises use Java for most of their development tasks, JRuby is an ideal candidate to start feeding Ruby code into existing Java codebases. Maik specifically suggested to “rubify your java libraries”. Finally, it might take quite some time to see a paradigm shift in what techniques are used by large companies’ development teams. In his own case, Maik mentioned that it took him more than 6 years to get Ruby into his day job. Therefore, one has to be patient and continuously promote the new technology by giving internal presentations.

If you are working in an enterprise context or are employed by a bigger company and would like to get ideas how to sneak Ruby, Rails or any other new technology into your day job, then it’s worth investing 53:48 minutes to watch the video of Maik’s talk.