Back in March I met with Todd Barr formerly of Red Hat and at that time starting his new position at the Austin-based Ruby/Ruby on Rails-based venture called FiveRuns. That was my introduction to Ruby and its ecosystem and I found the whole area one of the purest of the pure when it comes to open source. Ruby is providing a modern language, a 6GL maybe, and Rails provides a framework designed to run Ruby applications. Think Java vs. JEE.
Just as Java and so forth need all kinds of other software around it to really get mission-critical attention in enterprise IT departments, Ruby and Rails needs applications beside and on top of it or else it's just a useful academic exercise. Relevance is a consulting/training firm specializing--but not exclusively--on Ruby on Rails software development and hopefully on building that ecosystem. At this year's RailsConf, developers from Relevance led an interesting session on contributing to open source, one of the hottest topics today in the market.
Because Relevance is a consultancy and does not have a dog--that is, a product--in the hunt, it can be thought of as among the purest of the pure as well. It selects open source code that gets the job done for its clients rather than the philosophy du jour. I am beginning to call that "Let's let the cream rise to the top." Our guest on this podcast, Justin Gehtland, co-founded Relevance in 2003 with Stuart Halloway. He's been a programmer, author, and speaker since 1994. His 2005 book, titled "Better, Faster, Lighter Java," won the Jolt Award for Technical Writing, and he has authored eight technical books in all. He is currently focused on expanding Relevance's Ruby practice and, he says, "building the best team of agile developers in the known universe."
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