David Bolton Strikes Again

I am a Java developer, a C# developer and a Rails developer. When the “Rails is a ghetto” blog post came about a few weeks ago, it got out of hand really quickly, with a few people who have never used Rails, sticking the boot in. I could have written a response, but I hardly have the profile to really make a dent. One guy who does have a high profile and is seriously talented is Obie Fernandez (formerly of ThoughtWorks) who has written an excellent take on a mythical “Ruby Backlash”:

They want to keep Ruby (and by extension Rubyists) in our proper place! What is that proper place I wonder — perhaps it is out of the mainstream, out of the limelight, out of the enterprise, out of the places where we threaten the status quo!

All I can add is my voice: I will never build another standard database backed website in Java or php. I’ve done both, and Rails leaves them for dead. Plus, right now, programming in Ruby is pure joy. I’d be delighted if another language and framework came along to displace this, but I’m sold on this combo for the time being.

I can understand that many people have invested a lot of time in their Java careers, but some of the opinions out there are the stuff of witch hunts.

I’ve read and admired Charles Miller’s writing for a long time, and I know he is roughly a million times smarter than I am, but I think all his latest blog post proves is that people look for different things in a resume.  For instance one of the links Charles lists has brevity and factual information as important, whereas another says an in-depth history is key and personal hooks are differentiators.

I’ve read a whole lot of bad resumes over the years, and probably written some average ones myself, but the best I can come away with from all that reading and writing is guessing that a resume will likely be skimmed quickly, and that you need to interpret why you believe you would fit the job description.  I don’t believe facts alone can do that for you — there needs to be the personal input as well.  So Rands in Repose: A Glimpse and a Hook is the most accurate for me — but trying to guess how others read resumes is a tricky thing to do.