TL;DR: I'm fast with Rails
At the time I joined Sage Software’s agile development team in 2009-ish, I already had couple years experience with Ruby on Rails. I knew the framework inside-out, advocated good development practices and would often be charged with the task of helping colleagues learning good Rails conventions.
But only this spring I felt the magic happening: I became fast at prototyping. In part it’s because I stopped following pratcies like TDD religiously and instead found an appropriate place for them in my toolbox. Largely it’s because excellent UI frameworks like Bootstrap appeared and matured. In any case, I can now use those tools to build working software within days not weeks, and want to use this skill to ship products that will make peoples’ lives better.
Wojtek Kruszewski
Why Prototype at all
If you haven’t read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, I recommend you do. Planning and strategising is all well and good but it builds upon assumptions. You can take a leap of faith, pretend those assumptions are true and spend next year of your life buildig upon them. Or you can figure out what very minimal product would be sufficient to test those assumptions, and build it first.
Often it doesn’t even have to be an application, an AdWords campaign and a pre-launch page is enough if users are interested in your idea. When it comes to working software you want to test what features are most important for the users and used the most – and discard the rest. Remember: the less features your application has, the faster you can adapt it without introducting bugs. Let’s under-do your competition!
Why Ruby on Rails?
It’s a mature and battle-tested framework, with vibrant community and huge pool of reusable plugins. It has an established set of pratcies often called The Rails Way, so any developer warth their salt will feel at home when joining the project. With common set of practices accepted by wide Ruby on Rails community it’s also easy to have code quality of your application assessed by third party consultants.
Requirements
You need to be available online for at least one hour a day for real-time collaboration.
Questions?
Briefly describe your project to learn if prototyping with Ruby on Rails is the right choice for you.