geekmade

So we are in the throws of an economic downturn that the media in the UK has named ‘the Credit Crunch’.

I read recently on Techcrunch about the angel investor Ron Conway sending an email to his portfolio companies offering advice for the immediate future.

There is no doubt that silicon valley is feeling the global financial crisis and ripples have been sent across the pond to the UK. I think that there will be reduced budgets and less investments in UK startups, no surprises there.
It’s not all doom and gloom, I don’t think the Credit Crunch will hit the tech industry as hard as it will other industries, but we are certainly in for months of belt tightening.

A little story

In post war Japan, Toyota managed to manufacture and sell cars making a profit even though the Japanese economy was very weak. They developed the Toyota way, a lean manufacturing process to produce high quality cars in an efficient manner.

How does that relate to software?
In economic downturns customers have limited budgets and need to spend them more wisely. Projects have to be done efficiently and quickly to keep costs down. If that can also be achieved with high quality then you will stand out from the crowd, just like Toyota managed to do in the car industry.

With all that in mind here are my 5 reasons why Rails developers are well placed to ride the credit crunch.

1. Rapid application development

Developers can be more productive in Rails. The classic create a weblog in 15 minute screen cast by DHH put Rails on the map and showed off its code generators and MVC architecture that allows for higher productivity. Simple fact is faster project turn around = less expense. Rails allows developers to spend less time doing mundane tasks and really concentrate on delivering quality and what the customer wants.

2. Rails developers are multi skilled

In my experience Rails developers are comfortable in other areas not just Ruby and Rails programming. They tend to work on every part of a web app from user interface to server maintenance. So usually have a good knowledge of HTML and CSS, Rails also comes bundled with Prototype so JavaScript is not a problem.
Rails is not a simple beast to deploy so a developer will need to be comfortable with *nix based systems in the command line, setting up servers from scratch and performing basic sys. admin task.

Multi skilled developers are more valuable in times of economic hardship. You have a flexible member of the team that can be used in many different areas and you don’t need to hire staff dedicated to one area of expertise. Less staff = less wages.

3. Quality encouraged

In any community there will always be bad programmers and as a business owner you need to avoid them at all costs. The time spent fixing bugs and poorly the written code that they produce is a drain on resource.

Rails encourages TDD by having testing built in to the framework, Although many new Rails developers do not use TDD, after a while community pressure usually gives them a helpful shove down the road of testing enlightenment.
Any good Rails developer will be using TDD, BDD or some other practised testing techniques on a regular basis. Best practices like using version control and coding standards like DRY are also encouraged and all help guide Rails developers to produce higher quality, less bug-ridden code.

4. Agility

A lot of Rails developers are also agile practitioners, I think this is mainly to do with developers migrating from other languages to use ruby because it fits in with agile methodologies very well.
Agility takes some of its learnings from the Toyota production system (the Toyota way) and applies them to software helping increase a developers efficiency, speed, quality and skill.

Many of the top Rails based agencies like Pivotal Labs, Hash Rocket, ThoughtWorks and UK based New Bamboo follow agile methodologies and this helps to encourage the adoption in the Rails community.
A majority of good Rails developers will be using agile techniques already and those who don’t, there is a good chance they are doing it in some form, even if they don’t know it. (automated testing, automated deployment, short iterations etc.)

5 High demand for Rails developers

Rails developers are in high demand at the moment, mainly because of the because of the hype Rails has attracted and its association with Web 2.0.
Its fair to say that Rails has been hyped up a lot and many companies are starting to buy into the buzz, Rails has been marketed well and used successfully by 37signals so good Rails developers will therefore never be short of work, especially with 1 or 2 years of commercial experience.

Extra bonus: strong community

This extra bonus point was inspired by the article mentioned at the end of this post. The downturn could have a positive effect on the number of people using and contributing to open-source software. This leads me to my final extra bonus point.
The Rails community as a whole has a strong Open Source background. Many developers release plugins and Ruby gems into the wild under open source licences which can be used in your Rails projects. With well tested, open source code you can add login systems, HTML parsing, paginationand much more to your app easily and quickly, thus reducing development time and cost.

Summary

The Credit Crunch may mean that times will get harder for the industry. I feel that Ruby on Rails can be enough of a competitive edge to give developers an advantage in the current economic situation.
As long as the developer is good at what they do and agile enough to dodge what comes their way, they will be ok.

In other news

Got beaten to the punch by another article Can Ruby, Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?. This raises similar points as the ones above and has some nice quotes from DHH and Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard.
I really should post faster!