RailsConfEurope: How NOT to build a webservice
After a confusing and weird talk called Treading the Rails with Ruby Shoes by Eleanor McHugh and Romek Szczesniak (note to self: remember these names, I had the same weird experience with these people at RailsConfEurope 2006), I followed a talk titled How Not to Build a Service by Mike Perham of FiveRuns.
Quite an interesting and honest talk about the lessons they learned from building a (paid) webservice (a monitoring webapp for Rails apps). You can read the details in the slides. Worth the read if you ever want to run a startup that develops a product, but also if you develop a product for a client.
Interesting point he made was that you have to recognize when you are making a decision, keep track of them (e.g. document them) and determine your level of ignorance (how much do / don’t you know). Then determine what level of ignorance you are comfortable with / can afford.
Another intersting point he made was about groupthink (e.g. the whole group acts on the believes of a performance expert, but the expert does not have expertise on webapps. Then the group could obsess over the performance on the serverside, but looking at the images / css + js files / browser cache will make a much bigger impact on your webapps performance! See also post on Jeremy Kemp’s keynote).
Resources
Slides: later on conference site
