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I live in Los Angeles. Not far from Hollywood, Brentwood and Beverly Hills. In this town you frequently come across people who buy into their own hype and end up making fools of themselves.  Did anyone see Britney Spears at the VMA’s this year? I would ave missed it were it not for my daughter. Its a classic case of someone believing their own hype. It was horrible.  The landscape around here is littered with spectacular failures. Movies that get over-hyped, personalities - you name it.

With that in mind, somehow it really wasn’t as big of a surprise to find out that DHH believes his own hype. What’s a young man from a small Scandinavian country to do when he comes to the US and attains the programmer equivalent of rock-star status. It requires a whole lot more maturity than most of us had at that age to resist the temptations being thrown at him.

Rob Connery has a way with words and so often expresses ideas that have been percolating in the back of my consciousness and haven’t been formulated in a post because frankly half the time I don’t think my every idea or consideration is worth posting about. Here he is once again outlining in nicely researched detail some of my very own concerns. 

I’ve played with RoR. I have all the books published by the Pragmatic shop but I have yet to use RoR in a production setting.  I still think RoR is a great achievement and drove a considerable amount of change in the rest of our industry. But if I had one bit of advise for DHH it would - Dude don’t believe all the hype. Enjoy your moment in the sun but remember that moment will pass.

I’ve read the blogs and watched the many “oops” videos. What’s that old song ? ” Oh Lord its hard to be humble when your perfect in every way… “  I don’t want to take away from David’s achievements, but I completely agree with Rob’s post.  Thanks for being so eloquent Rob. His experience and  research parallels that of friends of mine who have actually worked on RoR production apps. In one case a very very very large enterprise put a stop to all RoR work - from what I have heard in part because of issues similar to the production problems outlined in Robs post.

Personally I would love to play with RoR as a front end to C# web services. Just to see how it works out. But from a business perspective, I have tools similar to SubSonic that allow me to be quite productive with ASP.NET, so I haven’t really gotten to the point where another technology was so disruptive as to make me change my tools of choice.