David Heinemeier Hansson

37signals

Rails 3 and the Secret To High Productivity
70 minutes, 32.3mb, recorded 2009-05-05
David Heinemeier Hansson

Five years and three versions since the release of Ruby on Rails, it still follows the original principles of improving developer productivity.  In this keynote from the 2009 RailsConf, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, reflects on some of the attacks Rails has survived, the philosophy and features of the upcoming Rails 3 release, and renegotiating requirements as the key to programmer productivity.

Over the last five years, people who didn't understand the strengths of the Rails platform have cited a number of reasons why it would fail: they said it wasn't enterprise ready, that it didn't scale, and some projects moved off Rails or had trouble with it.  Despite these concerns, Rails combined many small benefits that added up to more than the sum of the parts and has continued to grow and thrive throughout its history. 

The upcoming version 3 release has reassessed some of the key assumptions behind the framework and made it easier to customize behavior while still providing a flexible, capable set of defaults.  Changing to a different Javascript library, routing scheme, or ORM is now much easier.  Other changes have improved security against cross-site scripting attacks and refactored old code that hadn't been worked on in a while.


David Heinemeier Hansson is a programmer and evangelist of Less Software. He’s the creator of applications like Instiki, Basecamp, and Ta-da, and works with the open source community and design extraordinaires 37signals. Since its release in late July 2004, he’s also been leading the development of Ruby on Rails, a web application framework and environment for building real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.

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This free podcast is from our Rails Conference series.

For The Conversations Network:

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  • Series producer: George Hawthorne