Robby Russell, Founder, Planet Argon
Bob Zurek: Welcome to Database Radio, a series of podcasts from EnterpriseDB covering topics including Postgres Plus, business and technology experts sharing their views and perspectives on a variety of technologies around databases, PostgreSQL, development, environment, and tools and applications. Today it's a real pleasure to welcome Robby Russell, who is the founder and executive director of Planet Argon, which has been focusing on providing clients with design, development consulting, training, and hosting with Ruby on Rails for nearly four years. He is also a popular blogger, and I am really excited to have Robby participate in today's Database Radio show and have a chance to speak with him about Planet Argon, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and PostgreSQL. Welcome, Robby!
Robby Russell: Thank you for having me on today!
BZ: Why don't we kick off by having you describe a little bit more about your background and then about Planet Argon, including how you got hooked on Ruby on Rails? I know that it's becoming a very popular environment for developing Web 2.0 applications.
RR: I've been doing web development for almost ten years now. I kind of went through the transition of working with ASP.net and then working my way into the open source development world with PHP and Perl. I eventually found my way into the Ruby on Rails stuff about four years ago. I started Planet Argon as a freelance thing to do so that I could do side projects on the weekend and have something to market myself with besides just my name and working with open source projects and such. Three years ago we ended up hiring people to take on all the work I was getting, and we've kind of grown from there.
BZ: It doesn't hurt to have Robby as a first name, and, you know, Robby on Rails sounds really good together.
RR: Yeah, I think I came up with that name in the shower one morning almost four years ago. I went and set up a blog, and within a month I had over a thousand readers.
BZ: There are a lot of development tools out there. What do you attribute to the success of Ruby and its rapid adoption?
RR: I find Ruby to be a beautiful language. It's very expressive, very readable, very English-like. One of my favorite technical authors is Martin Fowler, and he always said that code is for humans first and computers second, and this is kind of the way I've approached development. Over the years, I didn't really like the syntax with .NET and PHP and Perl. I never really liked Perl, but I can get around in it. One of the biggest rules of Ruby is to make it really easy to read, allowing people to quickly adopt it. In regards to Ruby on Rails . without Ruby, Ruby on Rails wouldn't be Ruby on Rails. It really relies on a lot of the elegance of Ruby to make Rails the framework that it is.
BZ: If I were a brand new developer with some pretty good experience in .NET, Visual Basic, or C, what might you recommend to get started?
RR: It's always a little different for everybody. One of my developers came from .NET about two years ago, and it was really interesting watching him because he'd never really been a part of the open source community before. He was really impressed with how easy it was to pick up Ruby on Rails. If you're really well-versed in object-oriented programming, it's fairly easy to get on Ruby because everything's an object on Ruby.
BZ: What's your favorite operating system to write Ruby and Ruby on Rails on?
RR: I currently use Mac OSX. I used to use Linux primarily for about seven years until about three years ago, and I finally switched. So I had already started programming with Ruby on Rails before I started using OSX, but I eventually made the switch because I wanted to spend less of my time playing with updates to the Linux window managers and stuff, because that would end up killing a day or two. I like having a really stable machine, and OSX generally has a fairly stable environment.
BZ: You seem to enjoy using PostgreSQL as kind of the database of choice. When I go into Google and put in "PostgreSQL and Ruby," you come up in at least the top six links on the first page of the search results. Can you give us some insight into why you like PostgreSQL so much?
RR: I've actually been using PostgreSQL for six to seven years now; before that, I was using Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL for open source freelance projects. I actually got a job with Command Prompt about five years ago, and I worked with them as a lead developer for web projects with their clients, and they did a good job of showing me things inside of PostgreSQL that I wouldn't typically be doing within MySQL. Another thing I really like about PostgreSQL is that, while I don't use a lot of the advanced features as much as I used to prior to Ruby on Rails, it's nice to have the stuff there. For example, when I was working at Command Prompt they had released PL/PHP which made it really easy for me, as a PHP developer, to write custom triggers and functions inside of PostgreSQL. After I left, I was still using that functionality. With PostgreSQL, it's always nice to know that those features are there when you need them.
BZ: Is it pretty easy to get Ruby and Ruby on Rails working on PostgreSQL?
RR: Definitely. I've been using PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails for almost the whole time that I've been using Ruby on Rails. Another thing I like about PostgreSQL is the community aspect to it, where it's a community-driven project versus MySQL where they have a company that's helping run that organization, which is great for them, but I like the flexibility of the PostgreSQL licensing because it's very commercial-friendly. Of all the clients that we get, a lot of them have never heard of PostgreSQL. But going through and talking with their lawyers about licensing and how they would sell their product, and introducing them to the advanced feature sets, it becomes pretty much a no-brainer for them to go that route.
BZ: Do you have any thoughts about some great tools or add-ons for the Ruby developer, specifically Ruby on Rails?
RR: One of the biggest things that I hope any developer has is a source-controlled management system. That's a pretty important tool to have in your development set. With regard to Ruby on Rails development, and working on PostgreSQL, if you're going to be deploying to a Unix-based environment, I'd really encourage you to work day-to-day in a Unix environment, whether that's a Linux environment or, like we use at Planet Argon, OSX environment.
BZ: How are things going with Planet Argon?
RR: Even though we're not that big of a company, we do have three different services that we offer, and we focus on hosting. All of our customers are Ruby on Rails customers, and they come to us looking for our experience with hosting Ruby on Rails. We were one of the first few companies that offered real Ruby on Rails hosting. We have a product called Boxcar, which is a preconfigured VPS system that's all set up for a Ruby on Rails environment, which makes it really easy to deploy a Ruby on Rails plus PostgreSQL application really quickly. In other areas, we do have some web development for a couple of start-ups that we're working with. We probably work with about three to four start-ups each year, building an application to put in front of a venture capital firm or something to help them get off the ground.
BZ: What's your perspective on cloud computing?
RR: We internally debate about it. On the one hand, we haven't moved any of our clients to cloud-based computing yet. It's interesting thinking about some of the possibilities of using cloud computing for some big tasks. The idea that we can potentially bring up a bunch of instances in our Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL environment and just run all these huge tasks and then shut them down really quick is pretty compelling.
BZ: Are there any additional topics you might want to mention?
RR: I'd like to touch on why developers should be considering Ruby on Rails beyond Ruby's elegant code base. I think that a lot of people who come over from the database world to Ruby on Rails bring a lot of their own patterns for doing things, and Ruby on Rails is trying to do things a little different. One of the great things we like about Ruby on Rails is the fact that we can follow those conventions, and in return, we spend less time thinking about the same problems when we start a new project. Another thing about Ruby on Rails that's really great is that it's very easy to deploy an application because it's kind of baked into the application framework itself.
BZ: We're about at the end of our time here, but I really want to thank you, Robby, for sharing your time with us. Be sure to have a great day, and thanks again. This is Bob Zurek for Database Radio, a series of podcasts from EnterpriseDB covering topics including Postgres Plus, database technologies, as well as business and technology perspectives and opinions from industry experts. Thanks again for joining us today, and thanks for listening to Database Radio.
