Four days ago, April 5th 2026, my blog turned 20. Yeah, I’m late on the anniversary post. There’s a reason, and that reason is what this piece is about.

I started in 2006 on Google’s Blogspot, like most people did back then. Later I migrated to a Rails 2.0 CMS that already existed, went through Typo3, and in 2012 I built my own engine from scratch on ActiveAdmin, which I dragged along from Rails 3 all the way to Rails 7. Only recently, in September 2025, I finally abandoned that custom engine and moved to Hugo with the Hextra theme, which is what this post is running on. Twenty years carrying the same posts across Textile, migrating from Less to Sass, trading Liquid for Markdown, and trimming obsolete junk along the way.

Two decades, five eras

Something few programmers stop to think about is how much the tech world changes in 20 years. I talked about this at length on Akitando #37 — The Dimension of Time. When I opened this blog in April 2006, I already had 10 years of experience behind me. I’d watched the dot-com bubble rise and blow up in 2000. And from that point on I saw a few more big ones: the rise of social networks (Orkut, Facebook, Twitter), the smartphone and mobile app revolution in 2008, the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin being born in 2009, the cloud and SaaS era, and now the generative AI era.

I watched those waves crash for real. Each one completely changed how we work and who survives professionally. This is the kind of thing you only see from a distance, after you’ve stacked up a few turns of the wheel.

My own career went through some violent pivots. I told the whole story on My First 5 Years (1990-1995), but the short version: I started in multimedia agencies, moved into enterprise consulting working on SAP, dropped all of it in 2006 to jump into Ruby on Rails and open source, spent a decade running events — mainly Rubyconf Brasil from 2007 to 2018 — then shut the conference down and started the Akitando YouTube channel, which grew past 500k subscribers. In the middle of all that there was the pandemic that rearranged everyone’s life. And since the beginning of 2025 I’ve turned into a full-time AI researcher and user, running models locally and breaking things with Claude Code until they work.

Checking the /en/tags/ai/ tag, I wrote 51 AI-related posts between 2025 and 2026 alone — 19 in 2025 and 32 more in 2026, which has barely started. Between 2018 and 2024, the blog was mostly the transcript archive for my Akitando videos. I’d record the video, transcribe it, dump it on the blog, and people would read it there. But once I started writing actively again, I noticed there was a loyal audience that never went anywhere, even through the quiet years. That feedback is what made me start The M.Akita Chronicles, a more personal series about the behind-the-scenes of recent projects.

The problem I never solved

For those 20 years, one thing kept nagging at me. Since everything was in Portuguese, it was inaccessible to anyone who didn’t read the language. I’d been getting messages for years from Brazilian readers living abroad (Portugal, US, Japan, Germany, Canada) asking for some English version they could share with their gringo coworkers. Stuff like “look, I’d show this piece to my team, but it’s only in Portuguese.”

I always said “one day I’ll translate it.” And I never did. Why? Because we’re talking hundreds of posts. I spent the last couple of days looking at the numbers: 727 Portuguese index.md files in the repo. Translating by hand, one by one, would take weeks if not months of dedicated work. I was never going to find the stamina for that. And every year that passed, more posts piled onto the queue.

The ironic part is that some blog posts were originally born in English. During 2017 and 2018 I had decided to write English-first, trying to reach an international audience. A whole interview series — the “chatting-with” ones with folks like Hal Fulton, Scott Hanselman, Chris Wanstrath (GitHub), Blaine Cook (former Twitter), Adam Jacob (Chef) — were born in English and stayed there. The missing piece was the reverse: take the Portuguese posts and translate them the other way.

The weekend that paid off 20 years of technical debt

This past Monday I opened Claude Code inside the blog directory. And asked it to translate everything to English. That was literally it.

It kicked off Monday, April 6th, around 6:30pm. I let it run. Went to sleep. Woke up Tuesday, it kept running. Slept again. Wednesday morning it was done. Counting from the first translation commit to the last, it was something like 39 hours of elapsed time. Not continuous, of course — there were nights, lunches, a coffee break or two. In practice, one long working weekend.

The result is sitting in the git repo, in commits anyone can inspect on the public blog repository. Scan the log and you can see the cadence: batch of 2008 QCon posts. Batch of 2009 RailsConf. Batch of 2011 Objective-C. All of 2012. The 2015 Elixir series. All of 2016, 2017, 2018. Batch after batch, organized by year and by series. More than 80 commits tagged i18n: or EN translation: between the night of the 6th and the morning of the 8th. By the time I’m writing this post, 354 index.en.md files are live against the 727 original index.md. Almost half the blog translated in one shot.

And look, ninety percent of it was smooth sailing. The translation came out good, natural, faithful to my voice in the original — I honestly didn’t expect it to work this well. Claude Code respects the tone of the source if you give it solid voice and style guidance, and it respects technical ideas without “correcting” anything you wrote. Worst case, you review a few paragraphs. Best case, you read the English version and it sounds like you wrote it directly in the other language.

A quick aside on the Claude side of the bill. I’m a Max 20x subscriber on Anthropic, which is the heavy-use tier built for people who hammer Claude Code all day. I’d never hit the ceiling of that plan before, not even in my most intense vibe coding sessions. This translation weekend was the first time I genuinely blew past the Max 20x limit and kept going into the “extra usage” mode (Anthropic charges on top when you go over the monthly plan ceiling).

For a sense of the damage, here’s my account dashboard this morning:

91% of the weekly “all models” quota burned through, already into the extra-usage mode, R$280.88 (about $50 USD) spent on top of the flat monthly subscription, and there’s still a good chunk of the cycle left. It tracks: read the full post, generate the translation, run the humanizer on it, repeat hundreds of times in a row. The token volume is massive. And today, while I’m writing this piece, Claude Code keeps hitting me with API Error: Request rejected (429) · Rate limited more and more often, which also tracks: probably some combo of my own plan quota topping out and Anthropic applying general backpressure, because I can’t be the only one going nuclear with the tool these days. Fine, whatever. That’s the price of using the tool hard when it actually mattered.

The other ten percent was a different story.

When commercial LLMs say “no”

Half a dozen older posts flat out refused to translate. Both Claude and GPT, through their APIs, would bounce with a 400 error and a content policy message. I tried multiple times, fresh sessions, clean context. Nothing.

The hypothesis is simple: those posts touched topics that automated content moderation flagged. A 2009 post about Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech (which mentions cancer — Jobs was talking about the terminal diagnosis he’d received). A couple of old Ayn Rand chapters I translated years ago about rights of man and argument by intimidation. An anti-Nazi post that ironically got blocked, probably just because the word “nazi” showed up, even though the context was critical. A post about the money speech from Atlas Shrugged. And a democracy-and-ethics essay that systematically broke every attempt.

The ironic part here is that the only way to get those posts translated was using an open source model. I loaded up Qwen 3.5 35B in llama-swap, running locally, no corporate policy filters. The model read them, understood the context, and translated everything without drama. It’s the same model I tested extensively in my last LLM benchmark, and which I rate as one of the best open source models available right now.

So yeah — a Chinese model translated posts that Western models refused. I can’t help finding this slightly hilarious. Oh, and of course, I’m not allowed to speak ill of China (sarcasm). Commercial LLMs will always have the corporate-policy-and-preemptive-censorship problem applied with a fairly thick ruler. It’s a real trade-off for anyone using them in production: you get fluency and reasoning power, you lose control the moment the topic brushes up against whatever the company decided is sensitive.

The reverse case: 2017-2018 translated back into Portuguese

While I was dialing in Claude Code to generate the English content, I figured I might as well solve the symmetric problem. The posts I had originally written in English during 2017 and 2018, plus the whole “chatting-with” interview series from 2008, were sitting there without a Portuguese version. Claude Code ran the reverse: read the English, wrote the Portuguese. So if you never read the English originals (since most of my audience is Brazilian anyway), now you have access too. Take a look at the Off-Topic section to see what showed up that’s new.

On top of that, Claude Code also updated my generate_index.rb script so it understands the blog’s bilingual structure and generates two separate indexes, one in Portuguese and one in English. The PT/EN toggle in each post’s footer shows up automatically whenever an index.en.md sibling exists. All nicely plugged into Hugo, using its native multilingual pattern.

The bigger point

Here’s the takeaway I wanted to leave in this anniversary post. Translation at scale, hundreds of articles, your content, in your voice, respecting the tone of the original, used to be an expensive and miserable problem. Now it’s a weekend problem. This is already live — you’re reading the result. The barrier that existed to reaching audiences outside Brazil became cheap enough that I don’t have an excuse anymore.

Alright, so let’s wrap the anniversary recap. 20 years. 727 Portuguese posts, built across five different eras of technology. 354 new English posts generated over a weekend. Half the blog is now bilingual. And the rest will follow. What’s missing is mostly old ActiveAdmin posts, Rails 2 stuff, and obsolete tips that honestly deserve to be deleted or left untranslated on purpose.

If you’ve got a gringo friend who’s tired of seeing you post Portuguese links and needs an excuse to send them something of mine — send it. The main AI posts, the Chronicles, benchmarks, rants, and a good chunk of the historical archive are already available in English at the same domain, just flip the toggle in the footer. Thank you to everyone who’s followed this blog for these twenty years. There are readers here who’ve known me since the Blogspot days. You know who you are.

Here’s to another year.

This is a very old tricky question used in interviews. And if you at least watched Scorsese’s magnificent “Wolf of Wall Street”, you will remember this phrase.

But how many of you actually thought it through?

Introduction

There are any number of ways you can try to sell me the pen. You can tell me about the tradition of its manufacturer brand. You can tell me about its outstanding smoothness. You can try to persuade me on the availability of different colors and sizes. You can even steer away from the pen and start bragging about how many hundreds of pens you sold already, your tour de force.

I will argue that you can do all of those, but you will probably miss the point. And you will not sell the pen most of the time.

I’ve seen this happen many times. Most tech talks I’ve seen, for example, have this format:

1. Who is the sales person speaker. Achievements. Tour de force.
2. What is being sold. The Pen.
3. How good the Pen is or how easy it is to use.
4. “Buy it.” End of story.

There is nothing wrong with those points. Sometimes the speaker goes as far as doing “flashy” and “gimmicky” things. Doing a live coding session to demonstrate how good he is (not the pen). Doing a tech demo demonstrating what the pen is. All fireworks and firecrackers. But those dissipate very quickly, and no one talks about it later. It doesn’t stick.

And you don’t sell the pen.

Sometimes, brute force alone, the strength of the brand behind you, is enough to persuade a lot of people. But not most of them. Instead of selling the pen, the speaker sells the big brand, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. It was “no one was ever fired for buying IBM” in 60’s. The famous F.U.D. (the triforce of “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt”). Now it is “no one, usually, gets fired for choosing Facebook or Google”.

Again, you’re not selling the pen.

Elaboration

As any really good sales person will tell you, you’re missing the most important point in the sequence above, between items 3 and 4. You wasted an insurmountable amount of time describing the “What”. Most tech speakers waste a very long time explaining the “How”, with code examples, live coding, trying to convince you how easy it may be.

But they often forget to ask the question: “WHY the pen could be important for YOU”. “YOU” being the audience. You’re not connecting. You’re lacking empathy. You’re just telling them instead of persuading them. Telling and Persuading are worlds apart.

The WHY is the most important thing. And the difficult part in large audiences is that each person has a different “WHY” that needs a good answer.

Whenever I see a speaker/writer/evangelist giving too much time for immaterial stuff like “benchmarks”, “performance”, “hyper-modularized architectures”, I see them missing a large portion of the audience. They have legitimate reasons for worrying about those points, because they experienced it inside Unicorns like Netflix, Facebook or Twitter. Still, I will argue that more than 95% of the audience population will never have those problems.

Therefore, you’re trying to push a Lamborghini to people that not only can’t afford it, but even if they could, it’s not nearly at the top of their priority lists. Yes, the Lamborghini is obviously a fast and fine car. But WHY do I need it? WHY are you trying to push it to me? WHY is this pen even relevant to me?

Your priority is not my priority!

I see an interview as a talk for an audience of one. And I see a blog post as a talk for an audience I can’t see. The structure is exactly the same.

But in a one-to-one interview we all have an extra very important advantage: you get to ask direct questions! Do you realize how important that is? In a talk with an audience you have to make assumptions on what they want to hear. In an interview you get to ask directly and give straightforward answers, closing the gap of assumptions.

The irony is that most people don’t ask questions on interviews. It’s so much easier to make assumptions: “everybody wants to hear what I like to hear, because I know better”. This is the utmost lack of empathy.

Let’s say that you’re a top engineer working on performance sensitive tech in your unicorn startup. You tried everything and decided to write key real-time components near the bare bone metal, in C. And now you give talks about how important it is that everybody starts everything in C.

Now, communication is an art. Requires research, study, practice. You must understand your mother language very well, the grammar, the many subtle phrase constructions that better convey the message.

There are several “design patterns” when it comes to Argumentation Theory, many well known traps, fallacies you want to avoid. Everything to create a rock solid, simple to grasp, and difficult to refute, line of thought.

You don’t want to be easily proven wrong. So each phrase you deliver is like a chess move: you must anticipate 10 different ways it can be refuted and have responses for each.

Which is why you need to practice. Write, talk as much as possible, no matter the event. The point is the opportunity to get exposed to an audience with little risk, regardless of the size of the audience or your ego. Only tackle a large audience once you’re confident that you can defend your arguments.

Calibrate your weapons before you use them. When you start tackling the WHY, you may be provoking open wounds on the audience, so better be prepared.

But if you don’t go for the WHYs, it’s way worse: you’re FORGETTABLE. You get applause at the end, and after an hour no one remembers your name. What is the purpose of a speaker no one remembers later? Or a speaker that is funny and people remember the jokes, but can’t remember the content of the talk?

So they sympathize with the speaker, but the message is irrelevant. If you want to be an actor or comedian, that’s fine. If you want to convince people of a certain point of view though, that’s failure.

And the same goes for writing. You should’ve learned this in school. If you ever went through college and had to defend a thesis you SHOULD KNOW that the dissertation HAS to be divided in at least 3 sections: Introduction, Elaboration and Argumentation, and Conclusion. This is the WHAT, HOW, and WHY parts.

In a similar topic, if you’re into Agile techniques. Do you remember the classic User Story structure? Most people find it super annoying. Every other Kanban-like tool forgets that: they just tell you “write here what you want”. And most people just want to write the WHAT. Sometimes they write the HOW. But they feel lazy to think about the WHY.

As a X, I want Y, so that Z.

The 3rd section is elusive, but it’s the ONLY section that matters. It’s the WHY. Why do YOU want THAT particular feature? The WHY is the acceptance test. The Done Criteria. The only thing you should be looking for. We write what we THINK we want, not what actually NEEDS to be done. The User Story structure is yet another tool to bend your tiny reptile brain to use your more modern gray matter a bit more.

Conclusion

My goal is to bring attention to a point many speakers and blog writers are not doing: you’re concentrating too much on the WHAT and the HOW alone and not exploring the audience’s true concern: the WHY!

Again, whenever you see one of those cheap “my language is better than yours” theme and the argument is: “because in the benchmarks we can clearly see that it’s 50% faster” or that “we can clearly see that it uses 50% less memory” or that “we can clearly see that it can run more concurrent processes at once”. Those are ALL missing the point.

This is the HOW. It’s fine.

But 95% of your audience will rarely empathize with those points. They will agree on a conscious level, but the subconscious will tell them the truth: “you don’t have this problem.” Most of the time their servers are idling, doing nothing. How good a 50% or a 200% performance gain will help them? It will not.

It’s a major lack of empathy when a programmer, working on a big company, with many different teams colliding with big monoliths and legacy code decides that micro-services is the way to go. And now they “know” that if it’s good for them, it ought to be good for everybody, right? Therefore, anyone doing differently is a dork.

They’re not. Most of the other teams in the world may be small 3 to 5 people with projects that are yet to see the light of day. And here you have it: trying to implement your wonder over-architecture, and not getting any value back, because it delays their time to market.

Oh hey, their competition caught up, released first, they lost time to market, and all because they trusted your narrow sighted opinion, your lack of empathy with your audience. And this is the case when they listened to you. Most of them already forgot what you said, because it never touched their true concerns anyway.

And I am also to blame, I do this sometimes. In the beginning of my career I did it more, and the older I get the more careful I become on how I craft what I want to say. It’s very difficult to see beyond our small routines. It’s difficult to communicate with a larger and diverse audience. But if this is the role we chose to pursue, we must do better.

I hope this gave you some insights in how to structure your pitch in small to big talks or individual interviews or writing your blog post. It’s all the same: WHAT, HOW, and least but not last, WHY!

Peter speaks about Ruby on Rails, business, novices and, as a last-minute exclusive, he comments on the recent Nuclear Zed episode that shocked a lot of people in the community. Just to clarify, Peter answered my questions before New Years Eve, it’s only the last question that was added today.

Once again, I deeply apologize to the brazilian audience because I didn’t have time to translate this into Portuguese today, but I will do very soon. Stay tuned.

AkitaOnRails: For the Ruby community Peter Cooper stands for Ruby Inside. I personally enjoy reading your website as it accumulates most of the important Ruby and Rails news out there. Let me thank you again for adding my blog to your sidebar list. But how did it start? What do you think were the most important steps you made to build its good reputation?

Peter Cooper: Ruby Inside began as a vehicle for promoting my forthcoming (now released) book, “Beginning Ruby.” The name itself came from a comment made in an interview Geoffrey Grosenbach did for the Rails podcast where someone adapted Ruby into the old “Intel Inside” slogan, which sounded like a great name for a blog covering Ruby issues. Initially, the blog was simply to promote the book, but it quickly turned into a digest of news from the whole Ruby community. I think the key to its success was that the larger Ruby blogs at the time, the O’Reilly Ruby blog being a good example, were posting less and less as their writers were getting more and more Ruby work. Ruby Inside filled a gap of providing heavily digested news from the whole Ruby community, with only one or two posts per day, allowing Ruby developers to keep up to date with things, but without having to subscribe to hundreds of blogs.

AkitaOnRails: Looking through your LinkedIn profile I see that you’ve been quite involved with internet-based business for the last 10 years. You also describe yourself as a ‘serial entrepreneur’. Entrepreneurship is something very difficult here in Brazil, mainly because of economics and overwhelming bureaucracy involved. How difficult is it there in England to open and run your own business?

Peter: It’s very easy to start up in business in the UK. Depending on what you want to do, you can just say you’re a business right away, without filing any papers (although you do have to call the tax office to let them know!), and operate as a “sole trader.” Registering a business officially, however, is quite easy too and gives you a number of legal protections and a more professional image. Getting funding and so forth isn’t particularly easy here, compared to the UK, but if you’re willing to bootstrap, then the UK’s very good for easy banking, fast communication, and trading with the rest of the world. With the natural advantage of the English language, the US market is easy to target from the UK.

AkitaOnRails: Your other most well known products should be Code Snippets and Feed Digest. Can you introduce both of them to our Brazilian uninitiated? How did the idea occur to you? It was something like ‘scratching your own itch’ or it was something totally unrelated and maybe following some trend that you identified? What tools did you use to build them? Many people are interested to know what does it take to build a successful product. What do you think it takes to be a good internet entrepreneur?

Peter: Code Snippets was the first del.icio.us-style “tagged” public code snippet repository. In fact, I believe it was the first Rails application to use tagging at all, as I wrote the earliest code which was appropriated into a number of following tagging libraries. The site was launched in early 2005 and I sold it in February 2007 to DZone. Feed Digest is a service for mashing up, processing, and re-publishing RSS and Atom feeds into other formats, such as HTML, JavaScript, Flash, images, and so on. I sold it to a Russian company in the summer of 2007.

Both businesses / sites were a result of “scratching my own itch” as you say. I needed a system to store code snippets in a tagged way, and del.icio.us was not suitable for this, so Code Snippets came out of a 24 hour coding marathon, was publicly released, and then grew to thousands of users over time. Feed Digest evolved from an earlier service called RSS Digest that I created to scratch another itch, republishing my del.icio.us links onto the header of my blog. It grew far beyond that though, and now has over 25,000 users and serves perhaps about half a billion requests each month. I no longer own or have a direct interest in either of those projects now though, but I must be doing okay on the chart of people selling Rails apps!

AkitaOnRails: I congratulate you on your recently published book, from Apress, Beginning Ruby, from Novice to Professional. As Larry Wright states in his review, he is right that the Pickaxe is a good Reference book, but you take a different approach in being more careful about actually ‘teaching’ the environment. It does fill a gap as there are more and more people interested in learning Rails but lacking an introductory book to learn Ruby itself. Please, describe your book for our audience as I think many Brazilians don’t know about your book yet. What’s its target audience? What do you talk about?

Peter: The book is currently only available in English, unfortunately, so the US has definitely been the biggest target market so far. Content-wise, the book is very reminiscent of the “classic” programming tuition books I was brought up on in the 1980s. It takes a very “walkthrough” approach, with the installation of Ruby coming first, followed by a walkthrough of all the main concepts regarding object orientation, Ruby’s syntax, and the basic data types. Eventually, by the end of the book, the reader has gone through file operations, database usage (there’s even an SQL primer), developed a text adventure game, built a simple Rails application, and so forth. It’s very much a book you’d go through, as a beginner, from beginning to end, and then move on to more advanced books like the Pickaxe or The Ruby Way. Hopefully we will see it in Portuguese one day!

AkitaOnRails: And speaking of beginners, again I think it amusing to read at your LinkedIn profile: Does “left school at 16” count? If so, I’m in. Education is great for most, but overrated if you’re a grafter. I dropped college to work in the Internet bubble as well (though not as an entrepreneur, which I regret). I don’t recommend people to just drop college as I did, of course, this is a personal choice and everybody should take an educated decision about their own future. But there are a lot of people – at least here in Brazil – that praise certifications and diplomas much more than hands-on experience. Sure, there are very good certified developers, but there are more bad developers that actually ‘believe’ in their own certifications as a graduation for competency! I don’t see any correlation between diplomas and good developers. What is your opinion about this matter?

Peter: I have a lot of respect for people who take the academic route, and feel that in general they turn out to be better at their jobs than the less well educated. One of the downsides to being indoctrinated in academia, however, is that people with many degrees, certifications and diplomas often act like technological automatons, only understanding one course of action, not able to think dynamically on the fly, and unwilling to try radical new directions. There is a lot of room in the world for people like that, but on the other foot we also need a lot of “crazy” people who try things that initially seem idiotic or radical.

The other problem with people who brag about their certifications is that in many cases they are just proving that they managed to pass a test. Passing a test and having a lot of knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean you develop good problem solving skills or can work as a true developer, architecting solutions from scratch. For example, a builder might be excellent at building houses, but he’s likely to be very poor at actually designing buildings, which is an architect’s job. In IT, especially within smaller companies, it’s often necessary for developers to fill both architectural and development roles, and many people with certifications, but little real world experience, struggle with the design of systems.

AkitaOnRails: We are both Ruby and Rails evangelists, of course, but as myself I don’t see you as a ‘blind’ developer, meaning, the kind that needs to make everything else look bad just to justify putting Ruby up on a pedestal. I actually believe in the ‘right tool for the job’ approach. Not even DHH states that Rails is the solution for every use case. That said, I think Rails is the best approach for a niche of web development. Recently I involved myself – and I regret it – against a troll rant from a Brazilian .net advocate. I don’t dislike .net, far from that. Anyway, do you see yourself involved in rants like this? Or you do try to avoid them altogether? What is your opinion about ‘X vs Y’ type of discussions?

Peter: I think it’s possible to play interesting political games in any situation. As a regular human being I do have, of course, biases and preferences, but it’s important to recognize these for what they are and still be able to see the big picture. I believe in trying to use the right tool for the job (or, more accurately, the most efficient tool for the job – I’m not going to learn a whole new language just to solve one problem), so Ruby Inside runs on WordPress , a PHP-based weblog platform. In terms of bias, I’m certainly rather anti-Microsoft, although I do acknowledge that their approach to the development of GUI applications is light years ahead of everyone else.

I don’t try to avoid or become embroiled in X vs Y types of discussions, although I do tend to play devil’s advocate when they come up. It is important to remain as scientific and objective as possible in these situations, but I’ll certainly let a little bias show from time to time, as any human would. For example, I (and I’m far from alone on this, although a lot of people seem not to want to rock the boat publicly) am not particularly keen on David Heinemeier Hansson’s overprotection of the terms Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and especially the Rails logo to the point where he rejects the Rails logo’s usage on books that he has not personally worked on. I’m not afraid to show some bias and reference issues like these from time to time.

AkitaOnRails: This leads to another question: everyday I see people here asking us “Why should I choose Ruby on Rails over X?” Personally, I think there is no clear answer for that. Being experienced in many platforms like ASP.NET, Java, PHP, Perl, I did my choice based not only on raw performance (which Ruby lacks, for now), not even a mature library set (which is evolving fast, though). Some reasons were based solely on me being happier with this platform. I do think Ruby enables me to write more ‘beautiful’ code as Marcel Molina Jr. explains. But “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. What’s your take on this matter? Being an experienced programmer in other platforms, why did you choose Rails?

Peter: I was a Perl developer before I came across Ruby and Rails, and when I did see Rails, the first thing I did was try to clone it in Perl. Unfortunately, I’m definitely not in the top 10% of programmers, by any means, so my attempt was messy. I tried using Rails directly, reluctantly, with a self promise not to get suckered in to learning a whole new language, but merely to develop what I needed to develop at the time. Of course, the rest is history and I’ve been converted over to Ruby entirely, due to its consistency, ease of use, and the way it just feels like a “natural” language.

Back in 2004, Ruby’s library set was poor, RubyGems wasn’t popular, and there weren’t many books available, so it seemed like a poor choice, but these things have all changed very rapidly, and I’d say Ruby’s library set in 2007 competes very strongly with, say, Python, and while the raw numbers are behind those of Perl’s CPAN, the quality and modernity of Ruby’s libraries exceed it. Ruby is now a strong choice.

AkitaOnRails: I have to extend this theme because I think it is relevant as we see more and more switchers to Rails. I see 2 kinds of developers coming on board: the first being experienced programmers that were not satisfied with their current day-jobs and tools and wanted to try something new and refreshing. The second being novice developers that think Java or .NET have a higher learning curve than Rails. The latter worries me a little bit because some tend to think that Rails is too easy to be considered professionally and some even get frustrated in finding out that Ruby is not Basic, and you do have to make an effort to learn its way. You do training as well, what is your experience dealing with newcomers?

Peter: I have not dealt with anyone who’s completely new to Web application development, so I cannot give a strong answer. However, I certainly don’t feel that people are choosing to learn Ruby or Rails because it’s perceived as “easy.” Indeed, I think it’s the more experienced developers who consider Rails to be easy, and that’s why they’re giving it a go. Beginners tend to just go with whatever is in fashion at the time or what’s the most popular. There’s no shortage of newcomers to all of the major languages right now, it’s just that Ruby is now getting its fair share at last.

AkitaOnRails: 3 years ago the majority of developers predicted the “demise” of Rails as a viable alternative. Today we just saw Rails 2.0 out of the door and the Rails community growing faster and stronger each day. Now people do think of Rails as the contender to beat. I think this is a good thing because we tend to move faster (develop more gems, innovate more) when we are under pressure. Do you think people are accepting Rails more or do you still see barriers for Rails adoption, at least there in England or Europe in general?

Peter: I disagree with your assertion that three years ago a majority of developers predicted the demise of Rails. I think there were just a lot of defensive programmers choosing to disregard it. I also don’t think the majority of developers on other platforms see Rails as something to beat. There’s actually a lot of blindness in the branches of the programming community to the efforts being made in other branches. The majority of .Net developers don’t care about, and most likely haven’t heard of, Ruby or Rails. Developers on dying platforms, such as Cold Fusion, are more familiar with Rails, simply because they’ve been looking for alternatives, but Java and .Net are still taking on new developers at a far higher rate than Ruby and Rails. There is a large difference in what the blogs and other online media want to report and what’s actually happening out there.

AkitaOnRails: There were many things that Ruby was lacking and now we just saw Ruby 1.9 released. It is still no stable 2.0 but this is a clear sign that the language is evolving fast as a mature platform. Free performance is always welcome, but this release will break many things. Are you already using 1.9 or do you feel it’s still not ready for prime time?

Peter: I’ve played with Ruby 1.9 a bit, but I don’t routinely use it. I don’t consider myself a programmer in the academic sense. I like to be aware of, and dabble briefly with, technologies on the fringes, but I’m not one of these super-programmers who downloads, say, Erlang or Haskell and tries to learn it in a weekend. Ruby 1.8 will definitely remain my main Ruby interpreter for at least a few months yet.

AkitaOnRails: Our Brazilian community is still very young and small, I usually describe it as the US community from 2004 ~ 2005. We still didn’t reach critical mass. How are things going there at England or Europe? Is your community big enough that the market started to demand Rails related professionals already?

Peter: The market in the UK is still very small. There was literally nothing in 2005 but things have grown quickly in the last couple of years, although it’s still perhaps 1000th the size of the market for Java or .Net services. There are usually a handful of Rails related jobs floating around, but so far I’ve found that Rails is a technology that agencies are using for their clients behind the scenes, rather than something being actively demanded. I am not directly involved in the UK Ruby or Rails communities, however, so I cannot provide much more detail than this.

AkitaOnRails: This is just for amusement: if you were DHH or Matz what would you like to change in Rails or Ruby? Or maybe, where do you see both of them leading to?

Peter: If I were DHH, then Rails probably wouldn’t exist, simply because I think a lot of his excellent evangelism of Rails is driven by some craving of fame. At a more practical level, though, I would make Rails less opinionated and more customizable, simply because a lot of the opinions are too rigid to be practical in the real world. The initial opinion of relying on the database to provide information about model structure was a good one, but then along came migrations.. and suddenly we’re defining table layouts in code after all, often in many tens of different files! Why not just put the attributes into the models directly and let Rails take care of the schema changes transparently? DataMapper does this, and ActiveRecord is starting to look backwards in comparison with its bizarro approach.

On the Ruby side of things, I think Matz has done an excellent job technically, although whereas DHH scores high on the PR scale, Matz seems reluctant to promote Ruby at all. I think this is both because this sort of modesty is a honorable trait in Japanese culture, but also because Ruby is something he developed to scratch an itch, and another million or so developers using the language won’t benefit him significantly. He’s a great guy, but he lacks the craziness of Larry Wall (Perl) and the authority of Guido van Rossum (Python) and is incredibly lucky that he can rely on a very strong and vocal community to promote Ruby. One benefit of Matz’s hands-off approach is that people feel that they can take authority over various areas of the language and community for themselves without having to answer to a higher authority.

In terms of the technical side, the only thing I’d perhaps do if I were in control of the development of the Ruby language would be to make heavy pushes towards more functional constructs in Ruby 2.0. JavaScript and Perl 6 are taking strides into the world of functional programming, and Ruby needs to follow. I’d also be considering concurrency very strongly and making this a major focus for new language feature developments.

AkitaOnRails: What would be your recommendation for novice Railers here in Brazil? I mean, for those that wants to learn both Ruby and Rails but may need some guidance to start?

Peter: Well, if you can speak English, then naturally I’m going to suggest my book “Beginning Ruby” published by Apress! Unfortunately I’m not familiar with Portuguese resources for learning Ruby or Rails, although I’m sure you are! One free resource I would definitely recommend to newer developers is Chris Pine’s “Learn to Program.” It’s available as a print book, but a more raw version is available to read free online.

AkitaOnRails: Now, speaking of information, we had a very explosive new year beginning. Zed Shaw literally exploded in rants, cursing and every form of aggressive communication. As I stated in my previous article I was personally shocked at first, but I read it through – trying to filter down all the hatred, and uncivilized manners – and there’s actually some information buried there. What is your take about this episode?

Peter: Personally, I think Zed is spot on. I don’t like the way he has specifically attacked a few people personally (Kevin Clark, for example) for minor infractions. His language is harsh, and he clearly has a lot of vitriol. Behind all the swear words and chest beating, however, is a lot of truth. I sympathize with his main arguments, especially those raised in the “round two” update published on January 3rd.

Zed touches on the way some people form into elitist, ego driven gangs, such as Rails Core and the caboo.se. I was involved with the caboo.se for a while myself, and I have a great respect for many of its members (Courtenay Gasking and Amy Hoy, for example), but the whole thing stank too much of elitism to me, and I’ve distanced myself from all of this Rails related online socialization. I could recall quite a few pathetic condescending incidents from members of these communities myself, but unlike Zed I leave quietly. I think one of the biggest causes of the tension, gang-forming, and general childishness is that many of the people involved with these gangs have no social life outside of this community. This probably explains why parlor games like Werewolf and general goofery are so popular at the conferences, as opposed to, say, actually revolutionizing the field.

Lastly, Zed is spot on with his comments about the “Programming Ruby” book, more commonly known as the “Pickaxe.” I tend to remain politically correct on this subject, especially as I have a competing book, but the Pickaxe really is stunning in its mediocrity. It sells well because it has first mover advantage and name recognition, and no-one else has bothered writing a better reference book (The Ruby Way is excellent, but it’s not a reference book). For having the only printed Ruby reference book, Dave Thomas deserves credit, but it’s still mediocre.

AkitaOnRails: For the good or the bad, I have mixed feelings about this whole episode. I won’t judge anyone yet. Let’s see how it unfolds. And of course, I really appreciate Peter Cooper’s patience with me, kindly answering all my questions. Thanks a lot!

Either way, the post on the Signal vs Noise blog shows the status of the translations from other countries. I’m proud to say we are WAY ahead: most of them are still on the first chapter. We already finished translating all 16 chapters and we’re halfway through the review.

Which is why I called it “Release Candidate 2”. RC1 was a restricted release, RC2 is public, and in a few days we’ll try to ship the final version!

Thanks to the translators: Herval Freire, Juraci Krohling Costa, Marcello Rocha, Diogo Bispo, Adriano Mitre, Ricardo Augusto, Rodrigo K.

And also to the reviewers: Mateus Del Bianco, Diogo Bispo, Davis Zanetti Cabral, Gustavo Cardoso, Ricardo Augusto.

(Hope I didn’t forget anyone :-)