Recommendations For Updating Your Technology (part 1)

How often do you as a developer upgrade your toolbox?  Do you sync to the nightly build or work from the last stable release for your open source tools?  I find that when I start a new project, that’s when I take the time to evaluate my approach.  Once a project is under way, however, I only re-visit if I need to add something new or I discover a much better way to solve a problem.  And I do mean much better, not just kind of better.  After all, upgrading your tools, or your fleet, or your pipes, has a cost even if there is something much better on the market.

I am at that point right now.  I am about to start a new project inspired by some demos I saw at the SF New Tech meetup this week in San Francisco.  Comments on the Ruby on Rails : talk group in Google groups helped me realize it’s time to move to Rails 3 and re-evaluate some my preferred GEMS like restful_authentication. What I really want to do is to start my project right meaning doing things even more the Ruby-way and using the best recommended tools and techniques.  But how exactly do you determine that?  Here’s how I recommend you do it.

Step 1 : Contact the experts you know

I have the advantage of working for a leading development company.  When I need to learn about a topic, I can email our architects, project managers and team leads and just ask them.  Truthfully, this is a great resource!  I also work some of my social contacts.

Step 2: Follow the experts you don’t know

This one is simple: @dhh on Twitter.  David Heinemeier Hanson is the creator of Ruby on Rails.  From there, I jumped to the Google groups used by the community including Ruby on Rails : core and the aforementioned talk group.  I am also a member of the Ruby on Rails group at LinkedIn.

Step 3: Use social as an expert

Go to sites that have good information but also feedback loops from real developers.  Stackoverflow is the king of these, but Quora is a new rising star on the horizon.  One of the guys I mentioned in step 1 turned me on to The Ruby Toolbox which is simply awesome!  You’ll find categories of tools there along with votes for the best approach in each category.  That’s how I found out my user account tool of choice, restful_authentication, was not actually the leading choice by developers.  Both devise and authlogic ranked higher than what I was comfortable with.  I may need to make a change.

In my next post, I will list what I ended up with as my new toolbox for developing Rails applications.

Enjoy!