That Puerto Rican Rubyist

Yesterday morning, someone posted a comment on a post I wrote at the blog of the company I work for. This person, named ‘Tom’, said that our site was filled with lies, and that we had false advertising all over the place. Of course, I don’t get angry about negative feedback, and you shouldn’t either. I politely reply to the comment on the blog, letting this person know that we apologized for any misunderstanding, that what we claim on our site is true, and provided our support E-Mail address in case he has any questions or inquiries. We’re more than happy to listen to what people have to say. Well, Tom replies a while later saying that it’s “not my job to make sure your advertising is true.” Well, obviously he doesn’t want to open any sort of dialog with us.

I show this to my boss, and we started looking around. Obviously, we look into our site, using the IP address from where the blog comments originated from. We notice that there’s a user who registered to our site, named ‘Lucy’, registered with an E-Mail address different to the one used to leave the blog comment. It was a free Gmail address, and of course, the IP address could be the gateway address for a larger company. But we decide to continue looking on, with the E-Mail address of the registered user in hand.

Upon further sleuthing, we notice this person has left comments on blogs and newsgroups, under different names but mostly using one name, Mark, more than the others. He was also touting a particular site in all of his other posts. When searching for the name we found, it turns the perpetrator who left the negative comment on our site: the co-founder – and now VP of marketing – of a competing site. We decided to leave it there, since it’s obvious by his comments left on our blog that this person is trying to hurt us. Plus, it’s hilarious that our sleuthing was sort of akin to a South Park episode, where the boys discover some criminals by searching all major Web 2.0 sites.

I can’t help but laugh at this turn of events. I mean, here you have a co-founder of a competitor, and instead of focusing on how to actually make his product better than ours, he decides to take a stab at others who are competing with him, apparently in hopes of inflicting some damage. To make matters worse, he does it under different guises. To be honest, if this person came forward from the get-go and told us he was from that competing site, and that he thought our site was misleading in any way, I would’ve been happy to open the lines of communication towards him. I’m sure we both would’ve gotten something positive out of it.

I’m not saying that you should be totally oblivious to your competition. Like the saying goes: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. You need to know what others are doing, so you can get a leg up on them, do things they’re not doing and make yourself better. That’s the point of having and running a business. But to spend actual time making baseless comments to the competition leads nowhere. Even worse, it makes you seem afraid and desperate to even consider attempting such stunts. And we’re not even close to mentioning something called “professionalism”, which this person seems to be seriously lacking.

I can offer some bits of advice from all of this. Make sure you know who you’re competing against, but don’t spend your time on them. Spend your time where it matters the most: your product. If you’re sure of yourself and the work you’re doing, then you shouldn’t worry at all about someone else. And even if someone is doing better than you, instead of wasting time and energy worrying about someone else, take it and make yourself better. Like I’ve heard before, “A dog in desperation will leap over a wall.”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short post about the first Envycast released by the guys over at Rails Envy. I really enjoyed their first foray in the world of screencasting, so I was looking forward to see what else they would offer us in the future.

With the imminent release of Rails 2.2 (Release Candidate 1 was announced last week), it makes complete sense that the new Envycast would focus on Rails 2.2. In the Ruby on Rails 2.2 Screencast, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer talk about all the goodies that have been included in Rails for our use. Even if you’re currently subscribed to Ryan Daigle’s blog and follow the Rails commit history, it’s still nice to have everything in one easily accessible place. While an Envycast in itself should be awesome, they decided to also have a PDF available, detailing all of these changes.

Screencast

Clocking in at 44 minutes, this screencast takes you through the changes in Rails, divided by component (ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, ActionPack, ActionController, Railties) and specific topics (Internationalization and Performance). Like the first Envycast, all the action (well, as much ‘action’ as you can get in a Rails screencast) is done in front of a green screen, with either Gregg or Jason explaining what’s on the screen. As I mentioned previously, this gives the screencast a nice, personal feel, making the learning (and retaining the information) experience enjoyable and much easier – at least to me – than other screencasts. The infused humor also helps a lot with the learning process, making you feel comfortable and in a relaxed setting, which is key for learning new stuff.

Considering all the changes that have occurred in the six months between Rails 2.1 and Rails 2.2, this screencast does a good job in explaining all the new stuff. Although it doesn’t go too much into detail with some new features (thankfully so – I prefer short and simple, just like my Ruby and my Rails), my major gripe with this screencast is the lack of more detailed explanation on one major feature I (and I’m sure hordes of other Rails developers) was looking forward to: Internationalization. While I do understand this would need sufficient time to explain this new feature properly, I thought this was too big of a feature to just briefly touch on. They do encourage viewers who want to learn more to download and play with the Internationalization Demo App that was created just for this purpose.

Besides that, Gregg and Jason do an awesome job with this screencast. They explain these new features really well, make good use of the green screen (well, besides dodging pigeons and running away from Godzilla – trust me, you’ll see when you get this screencast) There were many “Whoa, I’m so going to use that in my next project!” moments for me, which for some reason didn’t happen when I read about these changes in Ryan Daigle’s blog.

After my short review of the first Envycast and liking it a lot, I was anxious to see if the Rails Envy crew would continue along these lines. I’m glad to see that they still produced a great screencast that’s easy to learn from and fun to watch.

PDF

Like I mentioned, they not only released a screencast on Rails 2.2, they also released a PDF to complement the screencast. The Ruby on Rails 2.2 PDF was written by Carlos Brando, a Portuguese Rails Core contributor who also wrote a similar (and excellent) e-book on Rails 2.1.

While the screencast goes over the new features in Rails 2.2 briefly, the PDF goes more into detail, with explanations and code examples throughout the book. There’s even an entire chapter on Internationalization, compensating for the lack of explanation in the screencast. At 118 pages (of which 86 are in-depth explanations of the Rails 2.2 features, 9 pages detailing the bug fixes in this release and 14 pages of the entire changelogs by component), it gives you all the new details in Rails 2.2, perhaps much more than what you need.

While the content is rock-solid, the formatting of the guide wasn’t too much to my liking. The PDF is in landscape orientation, which usually isn’t a big deal for me. However, the author didn’t seem to take advantage of this fact, as I think it could’ve been printed in portrait orientation without much formatting changes. Also, the PDF is just straight text (well, not counting the cover page, for those who like to nit-pick). There are no diagrams or anything similar – just explanations and code samples. Some diagrams or other illustrations wouldn’t have hurt to be included.

As a matter of example, if you see any of the Peepcode PDF’s (like the one on Unobtrusive Prototype.js), you’ll see they took advantage of the page sizes, filling it up without making the pages feel too loaded. These make reading less boring, while still keeping the core information there. It’s a nice combination.

Aside from some very minor gripes, these are quality products that will further your knowledge of everything Rails. I definitely recommend them to any Rails developer who is interested in keeping up to date with the rapidly-changing Rails world. Kudos to the Rails Envy crew for putting up another great product. I’ll be looking forward with what they come up next.