Jaikus
Dave Thomas officially kicked off RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin with his keynote; The Art in Rails. He was fast to point out the fact that he, during the first ever RailsConf in Chicago last year, made major mistake talking about Rails itself, and that he hadn’t done that at a RailsConf since then.
Dave Thomas went on to reinforce a point he, and many others, has made before; that software engineering is like art, and that the programmer is like a poet. Like a poet, a programmer can suffer from a writers block, and the best way to get out of that is to use prototyping. He pointed out exploratory testing as his favorite way of doing prototyping; a way of realizing prototypes through unit tests and mock objects.
His two other major points about the programmer as a poet was that you have to know when to stop, and that you must satisfy the customer. For the former, he stressed modularization and iterations as perfect ways for breaking up the development process into fixed pieces of functionality, and into a fixed amount of time.
For the latter, Dave Thomas explained the difference between taking a picture and making a portrait for artists. Painters rarely just paint a person reflecting the reality exactly as it is; they try to look deeper into that person and let his or hers personality into the painting - this process transforms the painting from merely a picture to an actual portrait.
The same thing goes customers of software projects. “We all need to get into the habit of not listing to our clients” Dave Thomas said, meaning that we need to dig out the customer’s real needs by looking beyond the surface and always ask why, why, why?
Finally the notorious author and speaker made the point that there is art in engineering, ad engineering in art. Ruby is the paint and Rails is the canvas. Dave Thomas urged everyone: “Treat your next project as if it was a work of art”:
- Be an Artist
- Create Something Great
- Create Something Beautiful
You can download my full notes from the keynote here.
[…] I truly enjoyed Dave’s speech, being the first of his I saw in-person. Rather than giving a tech-heavy presentation (that he had, from his own words, gotten several beating for), Dave went down the philosophical path of contrasting software development with art. His speech is covered sufficiently by Casper Fabricius and Stuart Eccles - I have little (if anything) to add there. […]
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Why was it a major mistake for him to talk about Rails at RailsConf? It seemed he had a number of very insightful, legitimate points to consider for future development. Whether or not you agree with his points about enhancing Rails for the enterprise market, the enterprise is such a significant segment of software development that it is worth having a legend like Dave Thomas present it.
Comment by john honovich — November 21, 2007 @ 7:40 pm
Well, it was Dave Thomas himself who said it was a major mistake, and he said it in a kind of joking way. Nevertheless I think he meant that since he is not himself amongst the most active of Rails developers, he might not have the sufficient insight and understanding of the framework to suggest the major changes he suggested last year. All in all, I think it was just meant as a fun excuse to talk about something else than Rails.
Comment by Casper Fabricius — November 21, 2007 @ 10:47 pm