Hedging Your Bets
A couple of us from Integrum were talking today about community, technology, and programming languages. Someone had mentioned the fact that they didn’t like the fact that we were betting it all on Ruby on Rails. When we started Integrum, we began as a general consulting shop offering lots of services in lots of different areas; we were afraid of “putting all our eggs in one [technology] basket.”
This sounds like a great business plan. You don’t run the risk of being entirely dependent on one technology or customer base. It worked great… at first. We generated a lot of interest from customers all over the map, from VOIP using asterisk, to Windows Desktop support, to custom Linux distributions, etc. The options were endless. That was exactly the problem, the options were endless.
Some of us on the early team had most of the skills to do all of these different things and then some, the problem was we couldn’t do all of them at once. There is a lot to be said about having a diverse set of skills, but a lot more can be said about having focus and discipline.
First, a little back story… About a year and a half ago I stumbled across this thing called Ruby on Rails. I had heard of Ruby before, but I was a big Python guy and we all knew that this Ruby thing was just Perl with a prettier face, right? Wrong. After playing around with the framework for a few days, I kinda liked it. I showed it to the rest of the team and they liked it to. We were in the market for a new web framework, and Ruby on Rails hit the spot.
So, back to now… at the beginning of this year I made a conscious decision that we were going to narrow our focus. I really had fallen in love with Rails and even moreso Ruby. I was (and still am) doing a lot of Python work for a client with a large and rather complex system that we had built for them, so my love affair with Ruby was still more of a side thing, to some extent it still feels like I’m cheating, but I love Ruby so. It is elegant, well designed, so… beautiful. I have never thought of a programming language as beautiful before, enjoyable maybe, but never beautiful.
So what does this have to do with hedging your bets? Well I like to hedge my bets in life, I don’t like to be fully dependent on one solution, one situation, one set of friends, I like options and a safety net, but that safety comes at a price. Being afraid to commit leads to a slight disfunction, a schizophrenia of sorts. It is very difficult to live life without making deep commitments, you end up doing a lot of things, but few things extremely well. There comes a time when you walk to the edge of the cliff, close your eyes, and just step off. That’s what I have done with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I am jumping in with both feet and not looking back. I am committing my mental energy to learning and loving Ruby, to spending time in the community, to contributing to open source projects using Ruby. Goodbye safety net! (and good riddance!)
My personal goal is to go from “Interested Observer” to “Active Participant.” I had a really great time last weekend with a bunch of the players in the Ruby (and especially Rails) community at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference and I want to throw my chips in with them.
So we at Integrum are making a huge commitment to Ruby and Ruby on Rails, in fact, we’re betting the entire company on it!
Thanks Josh Knowles for introducing me around last weekend and for your intense focus and passion for Ruby and the community that surrounds it!