Ruby conference notebook

Enterprise Rails host Engine Yard is planning to take its own server management tools and make them available as a service at other hosts, first targeting Amazon's AWS cloud-computing platform.

Engine Yard founder Ezra Zygmuntowicz, who also authored a book on Rails deployment, gave a brief demo at the Professional Ruby Conference yesterday, showing a few simple steps to, say, clone a new server configuration in minutes.

Several attendees seemed impressed, with one commenting, "I want to never have to SSH into a server again."

"Engine Yard as a Service" is slated to launch in January, he said, telling attendees to contact him if they're interested in beta testing.

Cool tool

Most in the Rails community -- and many beyond -- are familiar with Basecamp, the Web-based project managment site that spawned the Rails framework. But conference technical chair Obie Fernandez mentioned another Web-based -- and free -- project-management site that he called a "cornerstone" of his consulting business: Pivotal Tracker.

It allows for granular tracking based on user stories (agile-development-speak for a rudimentary definition of an application feature like "let readers see all reviews by topic"), with the goal of helping teams respond quickly and easily to changes, new issues and the like.

Web dev moving closer to internal users?

Should Web developers be in a separate technical group or spread out among departments who need their services? In a business near and dear to my own heart (and hopefully, as an information consumer, yours as well), publishing, one industry leader has created a Web development group based within its newsroom, not an IT or Web development department.

Ben Koski said he and his group at the New York Times work "directly with reporters and editors to help them tell their stories," creating interactive applications such as Hillary Clinton's schedule during her husband's presidency, a database of Guantanamo detainees, and election statistics.

Over lunch, he was asked for more specifics of how that works (and not only by me). Yes, there are more requests for projects than available developer hours. So who prioritizes the requests? The head of the group, who is a technically knowledgeable editor, not in IT.

He said he enjoys working in the newsroom, with one drawback -- having to work newsroom hours, such as late into the night on Election Day.

See more about Koski's presentation and the Ruby conference.