Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ari Lerner 8/1/08 10:44 AM

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ari Lerner

Published on July 28, 2008 by dean FiveRuns tagged photos on Flickr.

Welcome to this week’s Rails TakeFive interview, our weekly discussion about
Ruby on Rails with noted developers from throughout our community. This week,
Ari Lerner of CitrusByte and among other things, creator of PoolParty, a
framework for maintaining and running auto-scalable applications on Amazon’s
EC2 cloud.

FiveRuns: Hi Ari – thanks for joining us! Our own Adam Keys recently gave a
talk at RailsConf titled Oh, the Fail I’ve Known. In the talk, Adam outlined a few
different kinds of fail: learning failure (the knowledge was available but you See more FiveRuns tagged photos…
didn’t have it), technological failure (you did have the right tool), problem failure
(barking up the wrong tree), and so on. If you don’t mind, give us an example of
the fail you’ve known? Previous Entries
Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ari Lerner
Ari Lerner: The crumbling foundation fail:

We’ve all been there, the last remaining hours before a deadline and you just can’t get this one feature Other Categories
to work quite right, your specs are falling behind and you haven’t slept in 2 days. You figure you can Entries are also organized under the following general
hack up the remaining features before the meeting even though you know it is just a hack. topic categories.

What is wrong with this approach is that those features that you implement and hack together end up Rails
as artifacts, end up staying in your code. Without a solid foundation for the feature you are constantly Events
hacking against a poorly written weak base. Before you know it, the next crunch time is just around the TakeFive
corner and you are building hacks on top of your original hacks… and so it goes. Community
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I’ve befallen this issue more times than I would like to recount. It can be a struggle, but don’t give up Open Source
on best practices and the process. The application is really, in the end only as strong as your weakest Tips
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FiveRuns: Now that the Rails repository has been moved over to Github, can you talk a little bit about Miscellaneous
the benefits of Github and how SCM and agile development go hand-in-hand?

Ari Lerner: Git’s introduction into my workflow has not only revolutionized how I operate as a
developer, but how my entire team works together. It is not the only distributed version control system
in the world, but the power and flexibility it provides certainly makes the SCM process enjoyable.

I’ve also never felt as connected to other developers on my team as I have when working with Git. The
SCM encourages discussion in a way that non-distributed VCSs cannot.

As a development shop, Github allows us to watch our commit frequencies, easily find our points of
weakness, open new projects, and then share those with the world. In fact, it’s so incredibly useful that
it’s replaced Google as my homepage – that’s how much I appreciate it.

FiveRuns: Bruce likes to talk about “backpacking” through other languages. What others have you
dabbled in and/or are you learning right now? How have these travels impacted your work in Ruby?
Your overall approach?

Ari Lerner: Knowledge is never a bad thing. Derek Silvers’ public departure from Rails last year summed
up my feelings about other languages simply: It’s the most beautiful PHP I’ve ever written, all
wonderfully MVC and DRY, and I owe it all to (Ruby on) Rails. With that in mind, I’m constantly learning

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ari Lerner 8/1/08 10:44 AM

wonderfully MVC and DRY, and I owe it all to (Ruby on) Rails. With that in mind, I’m constantly learning
new languages and techniques, reading through others’ code, and paging through science journals for
this knowledge. Amongst several other worthy contenders, the language that has impacted me the most
is Prolog. Conceptually foreign, it’s a language that engages both sides of the brain. I’ve recently been
writing more C/Objective-C and sifting through yacc/lex.

Ruby – possibly my favorite development language – is incredibly powerful, but it’s ultimately a
programming language. I don’t think that Ruby has made me a better programmer, but it has given me
the tools to make that process easier. Just as Wesley outsmarts Vizzini in the classic poison scene of
“The Princess Bride” with knowledge outside of the scope of the issue at hand, using knowledge outside
of my comfort zone only makes me stronger.

FiveRuns: Beyond Merb, there are a great number of alternative frameworks for Ruby, including Nitro,
Waves, Sinatra, Ramaze, and even the microframework Camping. Do you have any experience working
with these frameworks? What have you seen so far that you really like? Dislike?

Ari Lerner: Rails, Django, Drupal, and others are all great tools – when wielded properly. I think that
developers often get mired down when trying to use their one-size-fits-all-tool-of-choice when
approaching a problem, and need to think critically about these tools and how to use them. You
wouldn’t bring a butter knife to fight a dragon, nor should you… so why use beefy Rails to build a video
transcoder when you can use Sinatra?

I have had quite a bit of experience working and contributing to Sinatra and have had the opportunity to
push several applications into production. Not only are they maintainable and self-contained, but they
are fun to write! I mean, how can you hate the

get '/' do
"This is the return response from the root body"
end

You can’t.

The trend is growing in the alternative-framework community to slim the framework down and include
only what is necessary. This is a great asset for these little frameworks. I hope the trend continues and I
look forward to seeing what comes out next.

FiveRuns: Amazon + Rails seems to be a prevalent choice right now,looking way back to the first
instances as early as 2006, and seeing how far we have come. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits
and challenges here?

Ari Lerner: Amazon’s Web Services is probably the technology that excites me the most at the moment.
The unprecedented flexibility enables developers to play, explore and harness the growing landscape of
cloud computing. The last time I felt the joy of working with a new technology, I was writing “Drug
Warz” on my Ti-83. If you have not yet looked into it, I highly suggest you take a peek.

Now to answer your question!

Cloud computing is all the rage today. Just as Rails revolutionized the web development framework,
cloud computing is the next logical step in hosting, but it’s not going to solve all hosting issues. The
non-technical challenge is to recognize it is just another weapon in your development tool-belt. The
developer is the real secret sauce.

The largest technological challenges are configuration and maintenance of the EC2 instances. there is
software on all sides of the spectrum that can aid in automating this process that can aid in automating
this process, from my own open-source PoolParty to commercial RightScale that aids in support.

Amazon’s EC2 makes it tempting to throw away proven techniques of deployment and management, but
breaking the encapsulation of the methodologies just spells disaster. I am always in favor of using all
the right tools available, but in their proper place.

I think it would be a mistake to have your application aware of its own hosting environment. You don’t
want your software knowing it is running on a cloud, it should do what it does best… be the application.

Ari Lerner is a solutions architect at CitrusByte in Los Angeles, Ca. He is a core contributor and has
been working with Rails since version 0.6. He has recently released PoolParty, an open-source approach

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ari Lerner 8/1/08 10:44 AM

been working with Rails since version 0.6. He has recently released PoolParty, an open-source approach
for managing and scaling cloud-computing instances. He graduated from the University of Arizona with
a degree in Computer Science and in Theatre Arts.

Permalink

Continued Discussion
2 responses to this entry

Ari Lerner is the man behind the mask. Seriously. Ninja skills.

William Fernandez said:

on July 29, 2008 at 09:43 PM

@Ari: do you think that EC2 is the best hosting solution right now? Only for huge app or also for
smaller?

Marek said:
on July 31, 2008 at 01:29 AM

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