We have been learning about Ruby on Rails for the past few months at work. We currently write in C# and ASP.NET. Now it has served us well, but there are some very intriguing things about Rails and the newer frameworks.

Convention over configuration.

This is a powerful notion. I think that fundamentally people like options. We are consumers. I like some things and turn up my nose at others (see OSX vs Vista). I *like* to decide, hunt, gather, and have an escape route. However, my two year old can only decide between two options, give him more than that and his head explodes. Why is that? He can’t process that much data at one time.

People like to have escape plans.

Options are like escape plans. If ‘A’ doesn’t work I can always go use ‘B’. As a software developer this is a difficult box. We have a tendency towards the solution with the most options. For instance, Rails is limited, ASP.NET is infinitely configurable. So I want to go with ASP.NET is a customer asks me about Active Directory integration I have a plan. With Rails I can’t do it… No escape plan.

We are missing a huge benefit of the limitations. With the more rapid development environment I can spend more time thinking about the design of the software. What should it do, what opinions does it have, what is it’s essence. That is the kind of software development company I want to run. Creating designed, opinionated, relevant software. I don’t want to wrestle with configurations, compilers, and servers. I want to think about presentation, workflow, and usability.

I want to program like a two year old, design like an adult.