David Heinemeier Hansson visits AppFolio

Over 100 of Santa Barbara’s brightest developers gathered at AppFolio Thursday evening to hear the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, speak. David started by giving the crowd a basic demonstration of the archetypal “15 Minute” blog application. David followed with a discussion of the framework’s most recent update (2.1), and ultimately touched on where they were headed for version 3.0.

One of the most interesting questions came from David Torres of BioIQ regarding scaling Ruby on Rails, and which companies have been successful doing so. DHH mentioned that the question used to piss him off when it was asked; but now, he doesn’t mind as much because Rails is following the scaling techniques of LAMP, Python, and a myriad of other frameworks. Push the problem of scaling to the hardware, software, and database level, and in most circumstances the issue can be solved by adding more hardware. He mentioned that applications such as Twitter, that have 10’s of millions of connections, will always have issues because they have a unique application and amount of traffic that the framework cannot solve alone. In one case, 37Signals rewrote a small feature in C++ to increase its performance exponentially.

I think the take away is that Rails is really good for small groups of people that build very powerful web applications in a very short period of time; but if that application becomes the next Twitter overnight, you may want to consider a more performance-driven framework. It’s not going to work for everyone, but the people that take advantage of the framework’s strengths will benefit from major productivity increases. These almost always trump the performance issues that you probably won’t run into right away. If your application eventually grows to the size of Twitter, scaling will be a good problem to have.

DHH Visits Appfolio by Kevin Milden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at newleaders.com.

Posted on Apr 18, 2008 by Kevin Milden

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