I accept planetmcd’s criticism of my previous post. I’m aware that I’m less than eloquent and my arguments less than logical at times.

I can’t say for sure whether anyone has ever done a presentation like that here. I do know that something like that wouldn’t be accepted not just because of the images (sexual or not), but because it doesn’t conform to corporate standards. Ruby/Rails/Web2.0 has no such standards, more,  the culture is one of being risky, on the edge, and of pushing the limits.

There are probably many ways that it could have been done better, but it wasn’t. The problem stems from not going to Matt, and expressing that they didn’t like the presentation. They could have suggested using ‘Fragstar’ next time (via Renae Bair). Instead choosing to drag Rails through the mud publicly, “Here is a professional community that doesn’t respect women”.

I’m aware that Matt has defend his position, and the DHH may have made it worse, but I don’t condone the method this was approached in the first place. It’s sensationalist and unnecessary. Do people actually think they’ve improved the community by acting in this manner?

The dress code is only one facet of what I was trying (albeit poorly) to express. If you asked a programmer whether he would prefer to wear jeans and t-shirt or suit and tie to work which would he pick? What is the dress code at the Web2.0 development houses (not having worked at one I don’t know)? If it is jeans and t-shirts then that workplace is different to mine. My current employers wouldn’t consider them very professional either – This is where it goes to the heart of the community. You can do development the traditional, non agile way, any time you want to put on a suit and tie and forget you know techniques like metaprogramming/bdd/tdd (and don’t forget how to use windows, because that’s what corporate professionals use).

I have worked for a few industrial clients where staff had nudes as desktop wallpapers (we’re not talking partial nudity either), and pinups scattered around the sheds. There were certainly females around, though how they felt about it never came up. They would consider themselves professional, in that they provide top notch solutions to their clients. Warranties & quality assurance, etc. I doubt my current employer would find them very professional either, sweaty, greasy, and not very formal.

One of the things that I’ve heard raised when Australian corporate entities deal with overseas counterparts, is that we’re a good deal less formal and respectful than they are. Socially and culturally Australians are more laid back, some might say unprofessional. Different people are always going to have differing opinions on professionalism, I find it unlikely that Matt felt he was being unprofessional in using the pictures and analogy that he did. I would hazard he still doesn’t feel he was unprofessional, though he undoubtedly realizes that it was a mistake.

Spent most of the night downloading Documentum 6.5 components for Linux & Oracle. While I would prefer to use an open source database like PostgreSQL as the backend, the actual database isn’t going to matter much once its installed (they don’t offer it as an alternative anyway). What I’m looking to do is have a D6.5 environment that I can tune to be as fast as possible. This includes doing things that you wouldn’t be able to do on a System that has to be supported, such as using Nginx as the front end instead of Apache Httpd  with Apache Tomcat.

I’m still a bit up in the air as to which App Server I’m going to use. Tomcat is the obvious answer and the starting point for clients that don’t want to invest in IBM Websphere,  BEA(Oracle) Weblogic, or Jboss. I do think that Apache Geronimo and Jetty are worth investigating as alternatives. One of the complaints that I’ve heard against Tomcat in production environments is that it is ridiculously unstable when running Webtop. With the app servers needing to be restarted every week (or more frequently). IMO there is more likely an issue with Webtop itself rather than Tomcat. I haven’t heard of stability complaints when running other webapps.

One of the big complaints against Apache Tomcat is that it isn’t a full stack App Server like IBM Websphere, for instance architecturally IBM Websphere has a lot more under the covers. I’ve not installed Apache Geronimo before but it’s supposed to be more of a complete App Server. I’ll let you know how my project goes anyway,  got to run off to work now.

Before I launch into my response to Peter Szinek, you need to know some background. Matt Aimonetti made a presentation at GoGaRuCa on CouchDB, which included sexual references and supposedly explicit images. I’ve looked over the presentation (which may or may not have the same content as the one at the event) and I have to say that I found it to be pretty tame considering the hype that had spread before it. When I first read the story (found here and here) it was framed in ‘how to scare women away from your development community’. DHH and probably many others, responded strongly to the controversy. I’m particularly fond of Renae Bair’s post.

This morning when I got to work I was greeted by another story…about how rails is still a ghetto.  I have to disagree with the argument. Yes if you go to India and go to a Hindu temple you should take off your shoes, and you should be refined enough to KNOW to take off your shoes, either that or the shoes at the door should give you the heads up. This line of reasoning isn’t relevant for a rails conference, because there is no guideline anywhere that says, ‘should not show pictures of that nature’. It may well have been a bad decision, but there without precedent, how was he to know.

This is where the argument that professionalism comes in. I certainly wouldn’t dare using a presentation like that at my work, because they’re card holding accountants and lawyers. The development community (in particular web 2.0) has a reputation for riding on the edge, this is not just rails (which has been pointed out by others), but many other frameworks/languages that consider themselves groundbreaking. Clearly there is a disconnect here, between being passionate and fun, and relaxing from corporate strictures. Professionalism should have had everybody there wearing a suit and tie, but I would bet they weren’t.

There has been plenty of coverage about this less than newsworthy event, so I’ll not waste any more time on it. Another couple of days, and it will have disappeared from reddit, digg, etc & and will be forgotten. The majority of people that use Rails don’t care about posturing and hype that people are putting so much effort into…that’s just a way of big noting blogs and looking important. Rails isn’t a ghetto, if anything it’s a train station, with a lot of people getting on and going places and a few people that feel the need to hang around and cause trouble. I’m not saying you don’t have a right to dislike his presentation, but don’t include the rest of us. Don’t pretend like he did something wrong just because you don’t like it. If you don’t like the way he did the presentation put together a better presentation and you be the one standing on stage.

On that note I’m going back to work.

Information Solutions – technology, is a simple way of expressing that the IT department is there to serve the needs of the client facing business. The current enterprise that I’m working at is the first massive global organisation that I’ve worked with. 130,000 odd employees throughout the world, with about a quarter of that in the APAC region.

I’m proud to say that the IS-t teams that I work with on a daily basis are excellent people, as are the people from other departments that I’ve had dealings with. Honest hard working people, just trying to do the best they can at their jobs.

Belief and evidence led me to believe enterprises move pretty slowly. Despite that things can change pretty rapidly up here, there is a level of adaptability that I’d not expected to find. A mission that IS-t should be an enabler for change, not an excuse that it is all too difficult. Things have been booming in the last ten or so years. A colleague has a graph on his wall showing the steady climb in the amount of employees that have been added to the ranks in Australia.

There was money, and there probably still is, but something changed a little while back. The negligence of the US property market (and other factors I don’t try to fathom) has sent the world spiraling into a recession. All of a sudden the extravagance of the last decade is thing of the past.

Business class flights are out the window for all but the highest of managers, and furthermore, travel itself only happens as an absolute necessity. Perhaps that’s the way it should have been all along. On Tuesday we had the largest video conference that the IS-t department has ever done.  People from the Infrastructure side of IS-t came together in a massive video conference that brought the whole APAC region into the one room. It wasn’t free but it was a damn sight cheaper than flying them here, or having them continue to work on their own and duplicate resources.

After all the scene setting I’ve done above, this is the real meat. There are steps being taken to eliminate the duplicity that has been taking place. No longer will there be 5-10 efforts to manage the desktops and laptop images (the standard set of software installed on machines), and why should there be? Sure it means a lot more work for the people in the Desktop team, moving from managing the computers of 5000 people to 30000 people, but there is an economy of scale. One or two people are assigned to create the image (or fix the image), and the people from other regions that were duplicating this effort can do other things, which does not mean redundancy. There is always too much work and too few people.

Technology has long passed the point where it is possible to work effectively across countries. My own responsibility, the Document Management System, is a part of this. Tools that allow you to collaborate effectively on the creation of documents, and create workflow processes that allow the steps taken when dealing with content, to be distilled.

The global economic crisis has changed a lot of things. Budgets that were a foregone conclusion have been reevaluated. This isn’t a bad thing, good economic times breed weakness. Rather than being smart about things, taking the easy way out because if you throw enough money at the problem will eventually go away.

I say bring on the chance to be leaner. The chance to prune to weak.