Judging a book by it's "sucks" result

A friend of mine asked me recently to go in on a little venture of his in the gaming industry. Unable to say "no" to what I believe is a fantastic idea, I went along with it...

Now there was another guy involved (technologically speaking) who wrote something that was a working prototype (awesome). It came down to a little discussion as to what WE should use for the front-end and storage mechanisms.

Well, having deployed a few real life applications in Ruby and having success with them, I only felt the need to display my affection and trust that I had with it and it's frameworks (yes, both Rails and Merb).

The problem I had wasn't that the guy wanted to use Python/Pylons or something in that realm. It was the argument. In fact, now that I've heard it a few times I can almost pinpoint exactly where the debate material is coming from. And that my friends, is simply fantastic. We're still not going along with the right tool for the right job, we're still shooting from the hip with what "we like".

Uh, but Brad, you just said you liked Ruby? You're right, I did. But given the requirements I was handed and based on past experiences it appeared to be the right tool for the right job.

I'm open to using new things - if I wasn't why would I ever give things like CouchDB and Erlang the time of day? They're sitting right on the edge of the programming paradigm shift from what most coders/programmers/developers are use to and it fascinates me.

Back to it.

I'm fine with using Python or whatever for a web interface. One more (hopefully) successful notch in my belt and slap proudly on a resume. But it just absolutely kills me when the keys of an argument are literally plucked from simply searching Google for "why sucks". What's even worse is when it's a predominantly blog rifling .

Please, please, please, I'm begging you the reader of this blog post; the rule here is simple, I'll even wrap it in a blockquote for you to save and tattoo across your chest in a Tupac-ish style:

Research first, execute later.

It's not the other way around, in fact, if you do it the other way around you're going to do your research the hard way; rewriting it in the layers you should have used in the first place.

Square pegs in round holes Pt. 1

Is everyone here? No? Fuck it, I'm going anyway...

I'm currently employed at a medical laboratory that was bought out a few months ago. In the beginning there were a few changes that needed to be made to the data-model (expected things). We (the people in "IT") were told that standard operating procedure at this "new" company was that everything server/application related would get swept into the corporate fruitcake and moved to North Carolina.

It was then apparent to these worker-bee's of the new corporate entity that this did not sit well with our group (which consists of me; a software developer, a network administrator and a help-desk technician). So stories were being floated down from people who, in the corporate hierarchy, are nothing more than someone's gopher about how we were unique and how everything would stay as is. Jobs weren't in jeopardy and life was good - not a care in the world. This same type of story was handed to other departments, sans servers of course.

Various meetings were held telling everyone to sit tight while things were jumbled about - you can insert your favorite corporate buzzwords here. I'm sure if you pictured it in your head you could just imagine this meeting. A southern gentleman who resembled Cotton Hill from King of the Hill standing in front of 80 people, fielding questions ever so diplomatically. The nervousness and longevity of his answers went completely unnoticed by my co-workers who resembled in my eyes a bunch of dogs at obedience class. *You can stop nodding now*

No one thought for a second to have a plan. They let these people waltz in and rip the rug right out from underneath them. Sad.

There's part of me that has some empathy for them but to take such a gamble on you and your families well-being based on some slick-talkin' stranger is simply ridiculous.