@andxyz wrote:
If you look at the core group of programmers, Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron. From my eyes I see.
a few years ago
- Jeff Atwood, he used to be a heavy microsoft guy (perfect fit for joel spolsky)
- Robin Ward, a web guy who just wants to get things done, and so he fell into rails
- Sam Saffron, an all around programmer, heavy into microsoft, but in actuality really just into coding.
current day
- Jeff Atwood is in a more management position now. He let's his team choose (look at what Spolsky did with trello)
- Robin Ward, is full on Rails now, he has gotten things done (forumwarz), he likes it. He looks at things like past performance as indicators, (yahuda is the reason for emberjs)
- Sam Saffron, is a polyglot, has recently moved to doing rails (he ported mini-profiler) he is awesome at linux microsoft hybrid. Now he is more full on opensource tech (I bet he sleeps better at night)
in conclusion:
- why rails? the team.
- why emberjs? the api, the railsness (see robin wards post http://eviltrout.com/2013/02/10/why-discourse-uses-emberjs.html )
- why postgres? rails is going that way, rails4 is concentrating more on postgres less on mysql. (I speculate due to mysql's stagnation and oracle ownership)
I am very happy the team released their rails app as opensource on github, a good rails-emberjs codebase project is
hardimpossible to find.as for some other concerns
- As for hosting, the $20 a month solutions for hosting rails stuff now exists (slicehost, linode, etc) rails is much more deployable and manageable now. (otherwise just pay them to host it for you)
- As for scaling concerns, see above for what Sam pointed out.
- As for ease of getting into it on OSX, I was able to install all this stuff after like 20 minutes of finding out about it on jeffs blog http://codinghorror.com . On my mac, it's so wicked the setup rails has, and I'm really really impressed with how everything just installed and worked. Maybe I should do a write up for osx people, just getting into it (I'm guessing they have a laptop, that's how I made the switch)
- As for ease of getting into it on Windows, I imagine Sam is the man to ask and have an awesome setup. It seems like an understanding of both windows, linux, and cygwin is needed. along with vagrant knowledge. This is what I mean when I say Sam is a polyglot mad man. I haven't gone this route, and I'm scared for windows people who are just now getting into rails. Not that it's hard to get, just that it's hard to take in all this new software just to install and work on the codebase.
- As for deploys, I imagine deploying to the server for the team is super easy too, I'm very glad to hear about multisite.yml support stuff.
thanks discourse team, for being awesome. (How am I doing for long-winded diatribe @codinghorror?)