One week ago, my co-founder and I found ourselves staring down a thick stack of paper UI prototypes; almost 50 pages total. One week before that, we threw out a perfectly good, working beta product because customer feedback suggested a significantly better path. The tale of how we ended up at that point is entertaining as well, but it will have to wait for another time. This is the tale of how our paper prototype turned a pair of long time Python developers (and documented framework haters) into Ruby on Rails developers.
Paper prototyping proved to be an extremely worthwhile exercise, but we really wanted something we could click around. We devised a strategy to build a clickable prototype that would evolve into production code. The plan was to stub out all of the views with static HTML and CSS. The CSS could be directly carried over to the product and the HTML could be retrofitted as templates. Having become religious about Sass about a year ago, I fired up the file watcher (which automatically rebuilds CSS) and set to work filling a directory with sass and html files.
After some time, I asked myself “I wonder if Haml has a --watch argument?” (it doesn’t) because Sass makes me hate Html’s verbosity. Armed with practically zero Ruby knowledge, I hobbled together a simple Rakefile and Haml watcher script and got back to work. A few Git pushes later, my co-founder, being the clever bastard that he is, simply installed Rails and the Haml plugin to replace my hacky scripts. “Neat,” I said and thought nothing of it.
Then we designed our URLs in an indented plain text file, which pretty much directly mapped into the routes.rb file and some trivial (empty method) controllers. Whoops! Now we’re writing Ruby.
“At this point, we might as well try Rails proper.”
Generated some models and corresponding migrations: “Wow, explicit schema with reflective model objects. None of this declarative schema bullshit.”
Wired up some controllers. “The structured params infrastructure is pretty cool.”
“Ruby is kinda fun. Blocks are super useful.”
Integrated Authlogic. “Wow, that was easy. I really like how it does not force any front-end decisions on me.”
“Rails is full of evil black magic that I do not understand, but it seems to read my mind, so I don’t really care.”
Started to apply some polish and work on the 10% that takes 90% of the time. “I think I can safely add Ruby to my resume now.”
Late at night, at the very end of the week, exhausted, we stared at each other. “Dude, I think we can show this off to people tomorrow.” Walking out the door of the office, my co-founder said to me “I feel so dumb for having ignored Rails for so long. I just assumed it was Ruby’s Django”.
We accidentally implemented our entire beta product in one week, with zero prior Ruby or Rails experience.
When I have some more time (and experience), I’ll try to write about specific design decisions that set Rails apart.
Paper prototyping proved to be an extremely worthwhile exercise, but we really wanted something we could click around. We devised a strategy to build a clickable prototype that would evolve into production code. The plan was to stub out all of the views with static HTML and CSS. The CSS could be directly carried over to the product and the HTML could be retrofitted as templates. Having become religious about Sass about a year ago, I fired up the file watcher (which automatically rebuilds CSS) and set to work filling a directory with sass and html files.
After some time, I asked myself “I wonder if Haml has a --watch argument?” (it doesn’t) because Sass makes me hate Html’s verbosity. Armed with practically zero Ruby knowledge, I hobbled together a simple Rakefile and Haml watcher script and got back to work. A few Git pushes later, my co-founder, being the clever bastard that he is, simply installed Rails and the Haml plugin to replace my hacky scripts. “Neat,” I said and thought nothing of it.
Then we designed our URLs in an indented plain text file, which pretty much directly mapped into the routes.rb file and some trivial (empty method) controllers. Whoops! Now we’re writing Ruby.
“At this point, we might as well try Rails proper.”
Generated some models and corresponding migrations: “Wow, explicit schema with reflective model objects. None of this declarative schema bullshit.”
Wired up some controllers. “The structured params infrastructure is pretty cool.”
“Ruby is kinda fun. Blocks are super useful.”
Integrated Authlogic. “Wow, that was easy. I really like how it does not force any front-end decisions on me.”
“Rails is full of evil black magic that I do not understand, but it seems to read my mind, so I don’t really care.”
Started to apply some polish and work on the 10% that takes 90% of the time. “I think I can safely add Ruby to my resume now.”
Late at night, at the very end of the week, exhausted, we stared at each other. “Dude, I think we can show this off to people tomorrow.” Walking out the door of the office, my co-founder said to me “I feel so dumb for having ignored Rails for so long. I just assumed it was Ruby’s Django”.
We accidentally implemented our entire beta product in one week, with zero prior Ruby or Rails experience.
When I have some more time (and experience), I’ll try to write about specific design decisions that set Rails apart.
