Category: Rant

Rob Conery tweeted about a blog post that “Kakubei” made back in May of 2012. You can read about it over here.

I find it interesting that the author starts off the post making a comparison between himself and his brother. That his brother’s academic success and his own academic failings (and subsequent self-taught programming skills) are at odds and that the industry would view one of them as a “real programmer” and the other one as not a “real programmer”.

As I often like to point out, every programmer is a self taught programmer. You may get the fundamentals at college and learn some things that can make you more efficient or a better designer of computer systems, but with the pace that technology is changing, you have to constantly learn to keep up.

That being said, Kakubei’s main complaint is that Rails is hard to learn. He compares the canonical “15 minute blog” demos to what it takes to do “real world” Rails development and he comes up with a big differential.

What I find funny is that he seems to have come from a PHP background. That means that he had to know the PHP language, possibly a PHP framework (like Cake), HTML, CSS, JS, probably MySql, etc. I say that to say this, he had to know a lot to work and he wasn’t coming to Rails from zero.

The author complains that to use Rails, you have to know Ruby and that you have to know MVC, Gems, RVM, Active Record, HomeBrew, HTML, CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, Rake, Capistrano, etc. My point is that he probably already knows HTML, JS, and CSS. If he owns a Mac, he has probably already encountered HomeBrew (it isn’t just for developers). If not, this was a fine time to learn.

I think this all boils down to something else, though. What does it take to be productive or at least “mildly useful” in a language/framework?

To me, I was able to follow a simple Rails tutorial and starting using Rails almost immediately. Know what I didn’t need? RVM. Just starting out, I just used one version of Ruby and Rails. As for Gems, in order to do my tutorial, I had to say “gem install rails”, so I already had an idea how it worked. After that, you can pretty much avoid using it if you don’t mind rewriting code that is already a “solved problem”.

What about HomeBrew? Don’t need it. Active Record? All you need to know to actually make stuff happen is in the “15 minute” video. Same with the MVC pattern. I didn’t know anything about making MVC websites and I was up and moving with minimal instruction from the video. Rake? Didn’t need anything special there, either, because I hadn’t created a very complicated system yet. Capistrano? I need an automated deployment on day one?

My point is that every rabbit hole is very deep. .Net? WebForms or ASP.Net MVC? HTML, CSS, JS/jQuery. Dependency Injection with AutoFac/AutoMapper/Ninject. ORMs like Entity Framework, NHibernate, etc. Don’t forget the language (C# or VB.Net or F# or whatever). How about Nuget for package management? Don’t forget source control, like TFS or Git. What about knowing testing like NUnit, xUnit, MSTest? Deploying with MSBuild and MSDeploy or one of the bajillion open source tools?

I could follow the same path to describe getting started in web development with Node.js or Python or whatever you could think of. It is silly to think that you can go from 0 to Amazing in 15 short minutes. That pattern doesn’t work.

What you have to know is how to learn. You have to know how to Just-In-Time the information so that you can be productive from the jump off. Yes, that means that you’ll always be learning, but if that concept doesn’t excite you, then you are probably in the wrong field.

I believe that that sort of complaining (“The development stack is too deep/rich”) shows a certain level of professional immaturity.

I realize that after Rob tweeted, Kakubei added an update after people started commenting, saying:

“I’ve been using Rails for more than a year and I still use it. In fact, I’m in the process or rewriting our main application’s API in Padrino with ActiveRecord, Thinking Sphinx and deploying to Heroku and it has been a primarily positive experience despite some teething issues. The admin for our database I’ve written in Rails 3.2 and there is a lot to like there. The idea was to write another post after this one titled “Why I love Rails” but I never got around to it. Even though this post is a rant, I still feel that way about Rails, so keep those comments coming, but don’t feel you have to convince me that Rails is good, I just take umbrage with some of its complexities and with the people who sell it as being simple and easy to learn. In the meantime, I’ll keep ranting.”

I understand his response and understand that he was probably frustrated when he wrote the post and he is not really apologizing for it. That leaves me to still consider my criticism valid that I believe that he faced the problem all wrong (or at least described a method that did just that).

To me, you learn the basics of the thing. You see what skills you have that you can already reuse (HTML, CSS, JS, SQL, whatever). Then, you pick up what you need, working with the “training wheels” that the frameworks or languages give you. Then, steadily over time you start to grow and move deeper in the tooling until one day you are someone that others look to for advice.

That’s the only way we’re going to make it in this crazy development world.

Raymond Chen recently wrote a blog post (now removed) where he talks about blocking shutdown in Windows versions since XP, and – being Raymond Chen – also the history and the why of certain decisions coming out of Redmond. This blog post was picked up on Reddit and people are slamming Windows for every possible thing.

What is interesting is that these people, who are suggesting that “Linux never had to do this”, just don’t get it. Linux is getting better, but it is *still* not user friendly. 90% of the people that work at companies that I’ve worked at could not run Linux without a lot of help. My grandparents couldn’t use Linux without a lot of help. Windows is generally easy to use.

If I generalize a bit, it almost seems like operating systems have their own “magic triangle”. You can have inexpensive, stable, or easy to use… pick only two. Linux is inexpensive and stable. It is free for the operating system and it runs on almost any hardware you can get, but it is NOT easy to use for the average “non geek”. Mac is stable and easy to use. It is known for all of its “user experience” and “it just works”, but it is not inexpensive. Once you own Mac hardware, upgrades to the OS are inexpensive, but to run the OS, you need expensive hardware. There is no good $300 Mac option.

Windows, on the other hand, is inexpensive and easy to use. It is growing more stable, but it still has a lot of quirks, particularly due to being able to support tons of hardware and tons of decades-old software. But easy and cheap is a tradeoff that many users are going to take. Because of that, Windows is going to have a place in the market for years to come, even if its marketshare will continue to erode as the marketshare of the desktop itself erodes.

But my theories about operating systems aren’t the point of this post, they are merely the backdrop. The point is that “nerds” (programmers, sys-admins, geeks, and all computer-savvy types) don’t sympathize enough with the average user. The computer elite just dismiss the average user as “dumb” and wonder why they can’t just remember to type “sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer” to install flash on their system.

Remember, there are users that take classes on how to use Microsoft Word! They need lessons in “Saving a Document”, “Performing Cut and Paste”, and “Changing the Document’s Font”. I’m not mocking them for this, I’m pointing out the reality that these people are dealing with. To ask them to understand “sudo” and “apt-get” or scavenging the web to find some “driver” for their video card (“what’s a driver”, “what’s a video card”) is asking too much. They just want to get on Facebook, do their taxes, check their email, and watch movies or YouTube. What makes sense for we Nerds does not make sense for them.

Building up that sensitivity to the plight of the average user will make you a better IS/IT person. As long as the prevailing opinion of computer geeks is that the user should be able to perform these <my_sarcasm>easy</my_sarcasm> tasks, people that sympathize with the user are always going to have an easy time finding employment.

I’ve said this before, but I feel like it is one of the most important things I can say to the professional developer/IT pro: “We are in the business of solving other people’s problems”.

Solving other people’s problems doesn’t mean solving them with what works for us. It means giving the best solution for them. It doesn’t matter if you work for a product company or in-house enterprise development. You need to create solutions that meet your customers where they are. The sooner we realize that these things are not always in alignment, the sooner we will delight our customers with the solutions that we suggest and build.

A blog post came onto my radar today after it made the rounds on Hacker News. It was by James Whittaker and it was titled “Why I Hate Search“. Full disclosure is that James works for Microsoft, so some people have the notion that he is just hating on search (and therefore Google) because it is in Microsoft’s best interests to do so. I am someone who typically takes someone at their words and – in cases like this – prefer to examine the argument based on the facts at hand.

James’ post starts off by talking about the entire notion of search is negative and is only actually positive when the search has concluded and you’ve found what you were looking for, be it car keys, a missing person, etc. He further argues that in “real world” searching, you learn from your searches and don’t have to start from scratch every time. For instance, if I lose my keys often enough, there are four or five places that I’ll check first and likely find them. His argument is that web search is a “start from scratch every time” proposition.

James claims that it is not in search companies’ best interest to make this problem better. Those that make money from ads (hi, Google), want you searching and spending time on results pages, generating impressions and click-throughs, and whatever else they make money on. In his estimation, the alternate to this kind of product is a “find engine”, like Siri. He points out that Siri comes from a company that doesn’t have a stake in search (Apple). His quote that summarizes this position is, “There’s no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.” He says that “Search is dead. The web doesn’t need it and neither do we.”

It could be that I’m entirely too stupid to understand this post or that I’m not forward thinking enough. Siri barely works if you get outside of a very small comfort zone. The way that I use Google every day is that I search error messages, and bits of quotes or lyrics, and generic problems that I can barely phrase coherently. Things like “what is the default LDAP port for Active Directory”. I just asked Siri that and she did capture my question correct with voice recognition, but her response was “I don’t know that. Would you like to search the web for it?”. In the end, it was a Google search that was performed that gave me the answer of 389.

That example is a COHERENT question of mine. What about when I need to search for something like examples of calling a SOAP web service from Android? I Google “SOAP Android” and find answers. Even if I form that into a coherent question, “How do I call a SOAP web service from Android?”, Siri says, “I don’t see Soap Web Service From Android in your address book, should I look for businesses by that name?”. Siri heard “call” and thought telephone and then screwed up the rest of the message, even though SOAP and Web Service should have given the AI a semantic clue.

I don’t want to belabor the point, though. Natural language processing will get better. However, I think that it is a pipe dream to expect that I can ask my question and Siri or the great great great great granddaughter of Siri will just give me my answer. Often in my searches, what is the answer for me is not the answer for someone else. I just can’t fathom a reality in which I can ask one question and not have a list of answers (yes, search results) to pick from. Even on Star Trek: TNG, for the hard questions, Data would ask the computer a question and have to search through tons and tons of information flowing past the screen to find the results he was looking for.

Search isn’t dead. In fact, more and more products and companies are starting to get rid of boxes where you have to search with “context” (put the first name here if you know it, the last name here if you know it) and instead moving to “Google-style” searches. The “single search box” is here whether it is Bing, Google, Stack Overflow, Sharepoint, Wolfram|Alpha, or even implicit ones like on Siri. The only difference I see between James’ imaginary future and our present is the ability for someone to give you the “one answer” that you are looking for, instead of results.

I’ve learned one thing by watching users and that is that people SUCK at search and they SUCK at asking questions, too. As long as people can’t form coherent questions or at least isolate the important parts of their inquiry, I don’t think search will ever change from the lineage that we are on.