I had to create a new category for this post — ‘Off Topic’. Hope you don’t mind but I just had to share this with anyone that’s listening. Everyone in the Western world needs to watch this video. Twice. No, Really.
Once upon a time, a book of “One-Minute Bedtime Stories” provided the wake-up call for Carl Honore, who considered time efficiency to be more important than reading to his son. He realized that he was speeding his way through life to the detriment of his health, productivity and relationships. As in his book, “In Praise of Slowness”, Honore shares examples of how we can make more of life by doing less and getting in touch with our “inner tortoise.” (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:00)
(I just got a link from a friend recommending the TED Talks and this was the first one I watched — looks like a gold mine!)
I think we have to do things fast because there are too many useless things to do and no one has bothered to “optimize” life..
so if we can do less with rails, and even less-er with hobo, then maybe we’ll have time to focus on things that really matter? like aesthetics and enjoying our lunch or a glass of wine instead of speeding through the good things so we can do the repetitious mundane things at a faster pace?
I’m all for slow baby!
LninYo, I think that’s exactly the point. From what he was saying in the video there’s good slow and bad slow, which implies that there must also be good fast and bad fast. :-)
5mph is a punishing pace for a stroll but excruciatingly slow for a drive. The right pace to build a Hobo app is nice and easy. Enjoy the ride! You’ll still get it done quicker than anyone else. When you’re riding in a rocket-ship you can afford to ease off the throttle a little, turn up the stereo and just cruise :-)
Nice. :-)
Tom:
completely off topic. As you are a veteran python dude why did you decide to go with rails instead of django? Sorry it has nothing to do with hobo or rails..i just want to know why ruby and not python.. i know there are many many sources debating this issue.. i just want to hear tom’s view.
Antonio - I did not set out to build Hobo, I set out to build a web-app, and Hobo was later spun-off that project. In fact I did start writing the app in Python. I think I evaluated Django and then switched to TurboGears before finally switching to Rails.
My memory is not altogether clear, but I seem to remember that Django felt a bit biased to very content-centric apps, that being where it came from. I didn’t spend a lot of time with Django.
I did spend a reasonable amount of time with TurboGears, and to be frank it was fairly painful. There was a user management component being added, and I needed it, and it caused me all sorts of trouble - always trying to do too much - to force me into a model I didn’t want.
Switching to Rails was like a breath of fresh air. It hit the sweet-spot of making things quick and easy, while leaving me to make the decisions about how I wanted my app to work. Convention-over-configuration won me over instantly.
Since then I’ve realised one important thing - when you pick a technology, where it’s headed is just as important as where it’s been. TurboGears seemed to have a disorganised culture with no strong direction. Rails otoh is guided by some very smart people making some very smart decisions. So overall I’m very happy I switched.
I do look back over the fence from time to time though, and think hmmmm. Pylons looks very interesting, and SqlAlchemy seems like it might be a very important retake on the idea of ORM. I haven’t looked closely though.
Excellent video Tom, and what a delicious irony to feature a video about ’slowing down’ on a site which promotes a tool for speeding up the development process. :-) Are we too being hypocritical, or do you think there’s more to this speeding up development concept than meets the eye? Rhetorical question.