[LRUG] Difficult second album

[Paul Robinson]

On 28 Oct 2013, at 17:22, Mark Burns <markthedeveloper at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been brewing the idea of talking about moving from Rails apps of the
> scale of 15 minutes blog post through monoliths into services, with a view to separating completely and maybe replacing components (with eek, dare I suggest, maybe non-ruby components) with messaging and queues and the like.


The problem with this as a talk is that you can't really teach anybody anything. Not because you can't teach anything, but because people only learn what is relevant to them, and it's probably impossible to structure a talk that is relevant to lots of people who are at this point in their app's life cycle.

If I want to teach you how to use Rails to build a blog, well, OK, I can do that. I can give you Railscasts that show you how to use gems and how to do certain things. That's easy.

And then you get to a point where you're on your own. You have to go back to the theory and the abstract stuff floating around in the community and look carefully at the problem domain and figure it out by thinking it through.

Nobody can help you. You're on your own.

So whilst your talk would perhaps be interesting and act as a siren call to those who are about to hit those problems that O'Reilly and Pragprog.com aint going to be able to help them out much for much longer, what they would expect from such a talk might only actually be given via a few weeks consultancy.

I'm not trying to say don't do it, I'm saying reduce the scope a little if you want to make it a talk.

And if you're not convinced, I'm happy to shoot the breeze about these ideas and others. I'm a CTO, have been a CTO, and consulted as a CTO after many years of working as a straight-up developer. The horror stories I could tell you about the exact moment we're talking about here... oh boy...