I received my new employee package and, in less than a week, I will officially become a full-time employee at  SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America).

I’m going to work in the PlayStation department, working on PS3, PS2 and PSP game titles developed by various game studios.

Why ‘o why?

Why leave behind a happy life of indie contracting to join corporate America?

For many reasons actually:

• A Team

Being a consultant I have been working with other independent consultants and existing teams. Nonetheless, I really miss being part of a stable team which grows together and learns from each other as we go through new projects and maintain old ones.

• Long term plan

As a consultant, I usually start projects or “rescue” existing projects. I work on them for a little while and then move on. It’s exciting and rewarding but you don’t really pay the consequences of your mistakes. You usually don’t have to maintain the code you wrote and you rarely deal with the mistakes you made.

It sounds good, nobody likes to maintain the crappy awesome code they wrote 2 years ago and most developers love working on new stuff. But at the same time, to become a better engineer you need to learn from you mistakes and assuming responsibility for your bad decisions is part of the process.

It might sound weird, but I’m actually excited to work on long term projects and feel some sort of ownership over the projects. Having to support games for many years means that I’d better not mess up the implementation. And if I do, I hope I’ll quickly learn from my mistakes.

• Avoiding burn out

There is no secret: when you are passionate about what you do, you have a hard time stopping and taking a break. I’m a recovering workaholic and it’s really hard for me to say no when I’m presented the possibility to work on interesting projects. I love what I do and I keep writing code even after I’m done with client work.

The problem is that this can start me on the slippery slope to isolating myself from friends, family and people who don’t share the same passion. I’m really lucky that my wife is a geek and loves hanging out at conferences, looking at code and playing with my buggy prototypes. But still, I spend too much time “playing” with my computer and I just can’t manage my free time wisely.

Having a full time position will hopefully help me put boundaries and will hopefully teach me to disconnect from work.

• Exciting projects

Hey, let’s be honest, how many geeks do you know don’t want to work in the video game industry? By the way, if you don’t have a PS3, they are now at $299 and on top of getting an awesome console you get a blue ray player! (And no, I do not receive any bonuses or commissions for mentioning the console or promoting it in my blog. I had to pay for my own like everyone else.)

Corporate America? Are you going to write Java now?

No, I’m mainly going to stick to the language I love: Ruby.
From time to time I will probably use other languages here and there, but that usually makes me love Ruby even more. The reality is that Ruby’s power and flexibility seem to be appreciated by SCEA, which makes sense when you have tight deadlines and a lot of new technologies to deal with. Ruby is a perfect match!

As you can guess, I can’t go into any detail about how and why Sony uses Ruby, but let me just say that while games are still usually written in C++, they are becoming more and more interactive and need to communicate with game servers where some logic operates. Game players also need to interact with other gamers as well as check their gaming progress online, as well as the progress of the players around them etc… Basically, outside of the game engine and the console SDK, there is a lot of potential for Ruby.

Coming back to Corporate America, I have to say that I’ve known my future manager for a few years now. He’s always been a fervent Ruby advocate and has introduced lots of teams to the happiness of Ruby & Rails development. He’s also a great developer who’s contributing patches to major projects and has a bunch of cool stuff on github. To give you an idea, my job description mentions Rails, Merb, Sinatra, CouchdB, MongoDB, Redis, AWS. All these Ruby technologies are actually already used in production or are being seriously evaluated.

I’m also really looking forward to join the existing team. I know I’m going to love working with a bunch of awesome developers coming from various backgrounds.

Those who know me, know that I’m not a morning person. And while your typical office job is categorized as ’9-5′, don’t feel too bad for me. I will be joining the video game product department, and morning people are rather rare in these kinds of groups

Conclusion

I’m really excited about this opportunity. For me, it is proof again that the Ruby revolution took place and that the Enterprise is evolving. Of course, time will tell if I am right, but I am quite confident.

Also, Sony is always looking for new, talented people who want to push the entertainment world to the next level. Feel free to keep in touch with me if you are interested in joining the fun.

It was encouraging to see so many people excited about what’s being ported over from Merb and the new options available to people who are currently limited by the existing stack. For those interested in pushing Rails further and doing stuff out of the norm, here are my slides. Arthur Zapparoli from Brazilian Rails squad recorded most of the talk and told me he will upload the video ASAP. You can also read Yehuda Katz’ blog which covers what he talked about.

It was really great to meet a lot of new people as well as people I only knew via IRC/IM/twitter.

It was a great honor to finally meet Dan Kubb (DataMapper), Ninh Hernandez-Búi & Hongli McLovin Lai (Phusion), Peter Cooper (RubyInside), Raimonds Simanovskis (Oracle adapter for AR), Arun Gupta (Sun/Glassfish),  Jeremy Hinegardner (crate), Michael Maxilien (IBM), Dana Jones (railsbridge), Zach Zolton & Geoff Buesing (CouchRest) and of course the Brazilian crew (lots of awesome .br guys came this year, I’m looking forward to RailsSummit) and last but not least, the French speaking crew (I’m glad to see Ruby is picking up back home). (I know I’m forgetting people… sorry about that)

It was also really nice to talk with some experts like Dave Astels, Aslak Hellesøy, Rich Kilmer, David Chelimsky, Ryan Brown, Derek Neighbors etc.. to get their feedback on various projects I’m working on.

Leaving Vegas, I feel like the Rails community is expanding quickly (it was the first RailsConf for 1/4 to 1/5 of the attendees) and that the community is organizing itself to welcome a new audience (better documentation, great initiatives like railsbridge.org, willingness to help), as well as trying to be more available to the ‘Enterprise’ world.

These feelings were enforced during our Rails Activism BOF and after talking with 3rd party developers and sponsors really trying to solve problems that newcomers to Rails are now facing. This is an exciting time.

This release is mainly targeting new developers and Windows users wanting to install the full Merb stack. Others can simply update their dependencies if they use the dependencies.rb file or install the new gems if nothing is bundled and no hard dependencies are set.

Merb is a metagem which installs a bunch of other gems (merb-core, DataMapper and a lot of small gems). The problem was that Merb was trying to install DM and dm-types, unfortunately, dm-types had a dependency on a gem which couldn’t be installed on Windows. All of that is now fixed and Windows users can install Merb 1.0.11 without having to manually pick the gems they need.

This release also includes a fix for people using CouchRest, a CouchDB Document Mapping DSL.

Merb 1.1 is still planned to be released in April. A majority of the work has been done, but since Yehuda and myself are going to be traveling, the release will be slightly delayed.

The great news regarding Merb 1.1 is that, on top of being fully Ruby 1.9 compatible, and using action-orm, and being closer to Rack, Yehuda and Carl have been working on the router to make it awesomer and ready for mountable apps

Stay tuned for more news.

update: People using CouchRest or another CouchDB ORM/DSL make sure you define your resources route with an identifier:

resources :articles,        :identify => :id

Otherwise, resource(@article) won’t work. (This is usually done by the merb orm plugin and I might add it to CouchRest in the future)

Merb::Config[:max_memory] has been fixed and now polls for memory usage every 30s instead of 0.25s. (memory is set in KB)

This new version also uses DataMapper.repository instead of Kernel#repository (DM and Vlad related bug fix)

We are still on schedule for Merb 1.1 which is planned for early April. (If you install Merb from our edge server, the latest version should already be Ruby 1.9 compatible)

Key items on the agenda were:

• Ruby 1.9
• Mountable apps
• migration path to Rails3

After spending some time arguing back and forth, we decided that few things had to happen before we could migrate the current slices to pure mountable apps. Freezing the releases while waiting to get that done doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Therefore, here is the plan for Merb 1.1:

• Ruby 1.9 full compatibility (with the very appreciated help from Maiha and Genki (preview of their work there)). Because Merb depends on different gems, we also need to work with 3rd party developers to make sure Merb’s dependencies are Ruby 1.9 compatible

• Merb helpers (fixes, enhancement and missing helpers)

• Make Merb controllers, rack endpoints. This is a fully transparent change for the framework users. By making this switch, we offer more flexibility to the router (you can mount a sinatra app for instance) and we adopt the same approach as Rails 2.3 making the transition to 3 much easier and facilitating the implementation of mountable apps. Again, this is an internal change and you won’t have to change anything in your application.

• Router optimization, Carl has been working on few tricks/optimizations for the router that will be available in 1.1

• Namespacing. If we want to make every single application, a potential mountable app, we need to namespace our applications. This is something we already do with slices, but currently generated applications are not namespaced. We are planning on doing that for 1.1 (backward compatible) to make mountable apps easier.

• ActiveORM. ActiveORM is an ORM abstraction layer developed by Lori Holden (AT&T interactive) which helps with helpers and other parts of your code accessing your ORM directly. For instance, the errors_for method need to be implemented differently depending on the underlying ORM. ActiveORM offers mapping for the 3 major Ruby ORMs: ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel but let you hook to it if you want to extend ActiveORM to support your own ORM.

There is plenty to do but we decided to still try to have an expected release date: around the end of March. As always in the OSS world, this is something we hope for, not a promise

What about Merb 1.2?

1.2 will focus on mountable apps and we hope to get started on a separate branch before we release 1.1. However, mountable apps are hard to spec and we need a better feedback from the community. Tell us what you like with slices and what you don’t like. Let us know how you would like the new mountable apps to work. Be as precise as possible. (you can leave a comment here or on the mailing list)

• Yehuda has been blogging a lot about the work done on the merge.
• I have been busy working on probably the awesomest CouchDB Ruby DSL/ORM.
• I have been working with the Rails Activists on the new wiki and many other projects.
• My sister is visiting from France (most of my free time is not spent in front of a computer anymore :p)
• I’ve been playing with MacRuby (see the end of the post)
• Ohh and spent some time maintaining Merb and preparing 1.0.9

Merb 1.0.9

Merb 1.0.8.1 has some issues with the merb-cache settings set in init.rb being called twice when you use some Rake tasks. (rake db:automigrate for instance).The problem is due to the fact that the rake tasks load the dependencies twice:

• Merb rake file loads all of your app dependencies and their rake tasks. (for instance rake db:automigrate is a rake task coming from merb_datamapper)
• The task you are invoking might start merb itself to load the models etc.. and starting Merb reloads the dependencies.

Dependencies have the option to have a require block. A require block is a Proc that gets called when the dependency is being required. In the case of 1.8.1, we added a default block to set merb-cache. The problem was that the block was being set and called twice and merb-cache was complaining that the default cache was already setup.

To fix this issue we worked on a band-aid type solution (read: kinda evil but ok). Even if you start Merb multiple times, the init.rb file will no only load once and the dependency require blocks will only be called once. However, in the case of merb-cache, the setup block is being called everytime you go through the bootloader. That’s why we added a verification on the block itself. In the long term, we are going to fix things nicely and optimize the way merb-cache loads.

We also addressed some other issues. Some people have been pointed out issues with some merb-helpers and patches were provided by the community (thanks a lot).

Talking about patches, we also accepted a patch fixing a small problem with merb-auth and some open-id servers.

Ruby 1.9.1: We started going through all the different places were things are not compatible yet, most of the work that needs to be done right away is focused on the router. Carl has been working on that and you can check his branch to see how we are doing. During the next week we will try to get things ironed out, we still don’t know how we are going to deal with the fact that action-args uses parsetree which is not 1.9.1 compatible.

The upcoming version also gets a brand new feature: memory monitoring by the merb master process. The master process checks that the workers don’t use too much memory ( you can set what you consider beign too much memory using Merb::Config[:max_memory]) and if one of the workers reaches the limit, it does a kill -1. It then waits a configured amount of seconds (defaults to 5) then kill using -9.

Finally, we also fixed a bunch of tiny issues.

1.0.9 should be released in the next few days.

MacRuby

Finally, because for those interested in MacRuby here are my slides from last night’s SDRuby meetup:

However, here are some of the latest news:

• Merb 1.0.8 should be released soon with some bug fixes and some improvements
• The Merb book got 2 new sections, Sequel and Active Record. I’ll be spending quite a lot of time on the book in the next weeks.
• Ted Han is working on reorganizing the Merb wiki
• We started a new mailing list for people wanting to help with the Rails wiki
• We also started a mailing list for people wanting to help with the activism effort

For those in the Phoenix area, next week, Yehuda and I will be at integrum/gangplank‘s for the Phoenix Rails User Group.

We are looking to meeting you all.

However, today is a special Monday. It’s the first Monday of the year and I have a special announcement!

During the Rails/Merb merge announcement, it was mentioned that I will be joining the soon to be created “Evangelism team”.

A few people asked me what being a “Rails Evangelist” means. To reassure my parents and close friends, no, I didn’t join a new cult worshiping locomotives. However, I still think that public transportation should be improved, especially in this time of crisis (but that’s a different topic).

A technical evangelist, is usually someone who knows and uses a specific technology and thinks others should look into it. This is something I’ve been doing for Merb while being part of the core team. I initiated and helped organizing MerbCamp, re-did the wiki, started working on the merb-book, spent time looking for and listening to users, spent time with third party developers and people pushing Merb to a new level (YellowPages, Wikimedia and many others).

This interaction with the end users and the third party developers is something the entire Merb team valued a great deal and I always felt it was something the community really appreciated.

As part of the merge, it was agreed that we would push things further and have a team within the Rails team to take care of “communication”. Rails is a bigger project than Merb and communication between the dev team and the users isn’t always something easy to do.

That’s why we have formed a separate team that will help communicate and support the community better. We now even have an official page on the Rails website itself

The Rails Activists

The A-Team just got announced on the Rails blog.

Instead of being called “evangelists”, we are going to be called “activists”. I think part of the argument was that the E-Team doesn’t sound as good as the A-Team.

We started with team of 4. You might not know them yet but they all are brilliant people and I’m really glad to be working with them.

Gregg Pollack, from Rails Envy. You might remember Gregg from the Rails vs * commercials or from the Rails Envy podcasts. I’ve known Gregg for a little while and he’s someone you can rely on and always full of energy/new ideas.

Ryan Bates, mainly known for his Railscasts. I only met Ryan once in person, but I’ve always been impressed by his work (don’t tell anyone, but I secretly dreamt of having something like Railscasts but for Merb )

Mike Gunderloy. I actually did not know Mike but I have read and enjoyed his blog and have seen his work on the Rails guides. Mike is an experienced writer and developer. He joked the other day saying that he started programming before any member of the Rails team was even born. Mike is a great addition to the team and I’m looking forward to learning from his experience.

Gregg and Ryan also covered the event, you might want to check their blog posts (Gregg’s and Mike’s)

So what are we going to do?

Pretty simple. We’ve boiled it down to 2 sentences:

The mission of the Rails Activists is to empower and support the worldwide network of Ruby on Rails users. We do this by publicizing Rails, making adoption easier, and enhancing developer support.

if you prefer a few more details, here are some of the tasks we are going to work on:

• Public Relations with media of all sizes
• Ombudsman work to ensure good user-to-user support
• Community Leadership at events and conferences
• Media Organization to help create good promotional opportunities
• Website maintenance
• Documentation efforts
• Developer support

Do we need help?

Absolutely! The idea is not that we are going to do all the work. The concept of this new team is to help organize the community. We are going to build a Rails Network, a network of people involved in local Rails “evangelism”/activism, people contributing and/or translating documentation, third part developers etc…

First thing would be to join the mailing list and share your suggestions, comments, concerns, etc., with us.

Secondly, we have already set up some forums to hear your feedback.

To start off, we are asking people to let us know what they would like to see happening in the Rails3 timeframe.
We have other forums for more general feedback, but we need to work with deadlines so we can prioritize accordingly. Using the Rails3 milestone should help us focus on a short/medium term deadline. Long term and not specific suggestions are welcome in the other forums.

Finally, contact us. You can find multiple ways to do so on the activism team web page.

• Foy Savas, author or the “merb way” wrote a very well written post on “Rails monoculture”
• Pat Eyler, wrote an article asking if Rails and Merb would be better together.
• Ben Aldred, tell people to stop worrying and start loving Rails 3.
• fotonauts.com a Rails and Merb Photo website developed by an ex-apple team, was featured in TechCrunch. Fotonauts is the perfect example of an app that will bain a lot from the merge.
• Yehuda has been blogging a lot about every single step and even though most people are enjoying a well deserved break, you can read the details of the work started on the merge.

Basically, the work started, we are getting familiar with the rails code base and are optimizing things slowly but surely with a focus on testing JRuby. The Merb router is being optimized and ported over to Rails 3.0. Rails and Merb developers will be able to stick to their DSL (so we stay backward compatible). Merb bootloader is also being ported over without breaking the backward compatibility. Finally, ActiveSupport is being broken down in more manageable/independant chunks so people will be able to pick only what they want to use. A “mini” version is also on the work.

• Merb 1.0.7 got released yesterday with a bunch of bug fixes.
• merb_sequel 1.0 should be released sometime this week and i’m planning on adding rails i18n syntax support to merb_babel.

While people still try to find some drama in a hypothetical war between Rails and merb …

The Rails team and the Merb team announced today that they will work together on a joined version of the 2 frameworks. This is so exciting! Nobody believed it could ever happen (I personally, seriously had my doubt).

Yehuda had a great post laying out the plan and explaining things in details. Check out David’s post explaining why he wants us to work together and his vision of a better Ruby world.

I have to say that I have been impressed by the Rails core team and especially David (DHH).

I’ve known David for few years now and we had long (sometimes heated) discussions on topics like i18n/l10n for Rails. David is known to be a very opinionated person. But if you come up with the right arguments, he can be convinced and when that happens, he is willing to move forward and shake things up.

This merge is a concrete example that David and the rest of the Rails team care about Rails and the Ruby community more than we usually give them credit for. As a unified team, we are going to change the way web development in Ruby is done!

But what does it mean for you?

I put together a FAQ video which, I hope will answer your questions.

Matt Aimonetti: message to all merbists

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Matt Aimonetti from the merb core team and as you might have heard, a big announcement was made earlier today.
I did this video to hopefully answer the questions you might have.

Q: So what’s the big news?

• merb and Rails team will work together on the next version of their frameworks
• merb 2.0 and Rails 3.0 share the same common endpoint
• we realized we now have the same objectives and agreed on all the key principles.
• merb will provide Rails with agnosticism, modularity, improved performance and a public API.
• The end product will be called Rails 3.0 but what real matters is that it’s a huge gain for the entire community.

Q: What??? I thought there was a war going on between Rails and merb, what happened?

• There was no war between Rails and merb
• We created merb because Rails was not fitting us
• We wanted better performance, more choices/ more modularity and a Public API.
• The Rails team now embraces these concepts and want Rails to follow them, so why not work together?

Q: Wait, does that mean that merb is dead?

• Absolutely not!
• merb development won’t stop, we are going to keep on releasing updates until Rails 3.0
• clear migration path, and upgrading to Rails 3.0 will be as trivial as upgrading from Rails 2.x to Rails 3.0

Q: What does the timeline look like?

We just started getting together to discuss the technical details. We are shooting for a release at RailsConf 2009. However it’s hard to estimate this kind of thing so, again, that’s just an estimate

Q: I just started a merb project, so what now?

I’m sure you had valid reasons to use merb, you needed modularity, performance and a solid API.
Keep on using Merb, we won’t let you down. The good news is that the next version of merb (Rails 3.0) will be even awesomer!

Q: What about my client who was looking at using merb for his new project?

If your client is going to be using merb for valid reasons (and not just because it’s not Rails) they should still use merb, but with the full understanding that they will end up using Rails in 6 months or so. Again, Rails 3.0 will have what pushed you to use merb.

Q: I’ve been involved with the merb-book, what will happen with this project?

• Rails 3.0 won’t get released right away
• still need awesome documentation
• if we look at Rails 3.0 as merb 2.0, we can easily imagine how the current work can be extended to the new version
• Rails team will also include an evangelism team which I will be part of, so will be able to focus more on projects like the book

Q: I’ve been working on a merb plugin, what should I do?

Keep working on it! We’ll assist you with the migration process and the new solid API.

Q: What if I still have questions?

Come talk with me, or any member of the new team. We’ll be open to hear your questions, worries, frustrations.
merb always valued its developers and we will continue to do so but on a bigger scale.

Lori Holden worked on merb_sequel and we should release a 1.0 release of the plugin in a few days.

I’m sure this news comes as a shock for many of you, but try to not see Rails 3.0 as the way Rails is right now. Imagine a version of Rails with true modularity and agnosticism (sequel, DM and AR will still be supported) and the same type of performance as what you get with merb. In other words, the Rails world is about to discover the power of merb!

Here is what Yehuda explicitly says in his blog post:

• Rails will become more modular, starting with a rails-core, and including the ability to opt in or out of specific components. [...]
• We will port all of our performance improvements into Rails. This includes architectural decisions that are big performance wins.[..]
• As of Rails 3, Rails will have a defined public API with a test suite for that API. [..]
• Rails will still ship with the “stack” version as the default (just as merb does since 1.0), but the goal is to make it easy to do with Rails what people do with merb today.
• Rails will be modified to more easily support DataMapper or Sequel as first-class ORMs. [..]
• Rails will continue their recent embrace of Rack, which [..] will improve the state of modular, sharable logic between applications.
• In general, we will take a look at features in merb that are not in Rails (the most obvious example is the more robust router) and find a way to bring them into Rails.

Personal perspective

I’m personally really excited about this opportunity. I had a hard time believing that we could work together but I was proved wrong. We have many challenges in front of us, but watching the two teams working together is very reassuring.

I’m also glad to see that we will have a Rails Evangelism team that I will be part of. I strongly believe that one of the many reasons why merb has been so successful is because we work and listen to our community. We have put a tremendous amount of energy into trying to understand what you guys need and what you like and dislike. In return, we have seen many people working hard on the wiki and the merb-book.

Can you imagine doing that with almost 4 Million Rails developers?

I’m also looking forward to working with a team and reaching to even more people.

Other news related to the merge:

• The RubyOnRails website will keep a trace of this historical moment: http://rubyonrails.org/merb
• The merb training scheduled for Jan 19-21, in partnership with Integrum, will still take place, and if you want to get a head start and learn about the things that will make Rails 3.0 totally kick ass, I’d suggest you join us.

If you have any questions, or if you want me to publicly answer questions on your blog please contact me. I’ll do my best to get back to everyone.