Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Jeff Cohen 8/1/08 11:10 AM

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Jeff Cohen

Published on July 03, 2008 by dean FiveRuns tagged photos on Flickr.

Coming off an awesome RailsConf, we’re picking back up the FiveRuns

TakeFive interviews, our ongoing series of insight and commentary from
notable members of the Ruby and Rails community. This week, we’re
pleased to have Jeff Cohen, co-founder of Softies on Rails share his views
on Ruby on Rails with us.

FiveRuns: Welcome Jeff, and thanks for taking the time to join us. Let’s get
started with a question spurred from the recent Ruby Hero Awards. Who is
your own personal Ruby hero, and why? See more FiveRuns tagged photos…

Jeff Cohen: Without hesitation my vote goes to Geoffrey Grosenbach. The

official Ruby on Rails podcast had a big influence on me when I first started learning Rails. It was one of Previous Entries
the few sources of information I had available to me when I was trying to understand what Rails was all Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Jeff Cohen
about, and the podcasts just hit the spot every time. His innovative approach with PeepCode screencasts
has set the standard again. He’s also one of the living examples of the “Matz is nice, so we are nice”
standard that the Rails community would do well to emulate more often. Other Categories
Entries are also organized under the following general
FiveRuns: Obie Fernandez’s startup Hashrocket, which has been blogged about extensively, is all about topic categories.
being ultra-productive in 3 days. Obie has written about ultra-productivity, but we have to ask – what
are your own tips around, to paraphrase Obie and 37Signals, getting real—on steroids? Rails
Events
Jeff Cohen: I’ve found two danger areas where my productivity curve begins to like that deep chasm TakeFive
Gandalf fell into. The first is overdesigning. It’s too easy to build more than you really need. I think I’m Community
being smart, but I’m just wasting time. So I recommend: write tests (or specifications, whatever you Partners
want to call them) first. You’re less likely to get too clever. However, you should write them at the Open Source
highest level of abstraction that you can get away with. High-level tests are good. They give you the Tips
freedom to innovate. Testing at too low a level tends to lock me into the “usual” way of solving the People
problem. The more high-level the tests are, the more creative the solution code can become. Announcements
Miscellaneous
The second productivity gravity well is any UI design work that doesn’t involve coding. Draw on a napkin
or photoshop something all you want, but it really means nothing until you see it on the screen. So
don’t prototype anything paper if you can avoid it. Start with simple, raw HTML. Inline the styles if you
have to. The goal is to go from idea to browser as fast as possible. Make it ugly, just make it work. You
can refactor it later into real HTML/CSS/ERB templates once you’re happy that you’re on the right track.

FiveRuns: What was your first “ah-ha” moment with Ruby on Rails and when did you know that the
framework was a good fit for you?

Jeff Cohen: It was the fall of 2005, and my friend Brian Eng in the next cube over asked me if I had ever
heard of this new thing called Rails. Now, this was back before there was even a 1.0 of Rails - I think it
was version 0.13. We were both working as .NET developers at the time. I enjoyed .NET development for
desktop applications, but didn’t really get the hang of ASP.NET so I always kind of shied away from web
development, even though that was what I really wanted to learn how to do. Anyway, we started
learning some Ruby on Rails to see what the buzz was all about. We helped each other figure things out,
and pretty soon I had a simple one-model web application running in my browser. It was eye-opening. I
used the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows, the Rails gems, and about 10 lines of code in Notepad.
The whole convention-over-configuration thing was just awesome. Rails was easier, more logical, and
simply more enjoyable for me than ASP.NET. Within a year, I walked away from my 12-year-long
Microsoft-based career to accept a full-time job doing Rails development. But the thing was, I was lucky

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Jeff Cohen 8/1/08 11:10 AM

Microsoft-based career to accept a full-time job doing Rails development. But the thing was, I was lucky
to have someone like Brian introduce Rails to me, and to learn from. I would never have made the switch
alone. So nowadays I try to spend time helping others when they decide to switch to Rails, too.

FiveRuns: Along those lines, do you have any specific recommendations for people switching to Rails
from another language or framework?

Jeff Cohen: First, they should learn Ruby apart from Rails. When I see ugly Rails code, a shallow
understanding of Ruby is often to blame. The better you get at Ruby, the better your Rails code will
automatically become. Second, learn how to model your domain properly. I know Ajax is fun to do, and
it’s also easy to put all your logic into your controllers. But the best Rails apps also have a rich, cool
domain model. Their models are the gears for the application. The controllers decide which gear needs
a nudge, and wonderful things seem to happen. Finally, read! Get a couple books, read blogs, and read
other people’s code. Don’t just Google for code snippets and then ask for help when you get stuck two
minutes later. You really need to learn the basics first. And once you’ve starting to get your feet under
you, start helping others who are just starting out. You inevitably learn something yourself, and it’s a
way you can immediately begin to give back to the community.

FiveRuns: Let’s talk a bit about Rails 2.1, which was recently released with the help of over 1400
contributors. What about the new release excites you the most—and as a follow-up, what are the most
important things in your mind to get done for the next major release?

Jeff Cohen: I was glad to hear from people who went to RailsConf that Jeremy Kemper spoke about how
the core team is focusing less on new features these days, and more on security and scalability. I think
the overall feature set of Rails is quite strong. If anything, I want less. I cringe a bit when I see pleas for
more configurability. I don’t think that’s what we need right now. Rails must remain good at its core
purpose: database-backed web applications. I want it be very opinionated. I love conventions that make
things really easy for the 80% case. But one thing I do wish for, is an easier way to share code among
Rails applications. Plugins work well up to a point. I think most people would like an easier way to share
an entire MVC “molecule”: a model-view-controller capsule that can be shared among applications. It’s
not an easy problem to solve, and it’s not like I have a solution for it yet, either.

Jeff Cohen has worked with object-oriented programming languages and frameworks for more than 15
years. A former MCSD, he co-founded the SoftiesOnRails blog at www.softiesonrails.com in 2005. He is
the founder of Purple Workshops, and is currently writing a book with Brian Eng titled Rails for .NET
Developers to be published by Pragmatic Bookshelf this fall.

Permalink

Continued Discussion
3 responses to this entry

Great interview. It is nice to hear from someone who like Rails for what it is and doesn’t want more
configuration.

I want to comment on the last answer where Mr. Cohen talks about plugins working well up to a
point. I have been using Merb, which uses the gem framework for plugins, and I think that it is really
an intelligent use of a well done code distribution framework. It is even more important, in my
humble opinion, to start to develop some best practices around plugin development.

As Mr. Cohen said, there is a desire from developers to drop in an “MVC ‘Molecule.’” There is,
however some danger in breaking the MVC separation when doing this. As Rails and derived
frameworks like Merb become more storage system agnostic, and as projects become more complex,
it is getting more and more difficult to write plugins that just work.

I would be very interested to hear from some of the programming style luminaries (zealots?) about
best practices for web framework plugins.

StarTrader said:
on July 08, 2008 at 10:26 AM

StarTrader,

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Jeff Cohen 8/1/08 11:10 AM

I agree a well-structured plugin system was something Merb got right early on; Merb’s use of
RubyGems for dependency resolution and distribution was the right decision. A good number of Rails
folks, including myself, submitted ideas and patches to grow Rails out of its ad hoc vendor/plugins
system (a hack that seemingly refused to die, partially due to its enormous popularity) to gems, and
thankfully in Rails 2.1 some significant progress has been made on that front. Sure, there’s a lot of
work left to do… most importantly getting the word out.

Ensuring that plugins play nice together is, in the end, the responsibility of the individual developer
and plugin author, and I’m sure we’ll continue to worry about compatibility and MVC separation
(ivory tower or not) regardless of fancy, well-thought-out plugin systems; in a dynamic language
very few things can be enforced. Hopefully the communities around the various Ruby frameworks
will naturally adopt plugins that play fair and don’t ruin the party for everyone else; it seems like a
largely social, rather than technical, problem.

Bruce Williams said:

on July 09, 2008 at 03:00 PM

agree with the above. thanks for the post

take five said:

on July 21, 2008 at 05:38 AM

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