Rails evangelism

At my day job, each of the engineers is responsible for giving a technical presentation a couple times a year. We can talk about pretty much anything we want, though the more relevant it is, the better. My presentation slot came up Monday, and I decided to give a demo of Ruby On Rails.

We're developing a J2EE app with a great deal of legacy code on the database, so I didn't score very highly on the relevance category. But I focused on the cool features that Rails has to make development easy, with the hope that we might learn some principles that we can incorporate into our own development.

I started with the same basic steps that DHH shows in his 15-min Rails movie. But I diverged from his script about half way through and instead spent a lot of time on the testing framework and how that makes development easier and more XP-like.

The presentation went over really well — people seemed interested and excited. Not that we'll ever be able to use it at work, but it's good for us to hear what the rest of the developer community is excited about.