Luke Francl
Working with others: Best Practices for Rails Teams
In "The Mythical Man-Month", Fred Brooks noted that adding more developers to a project can actually delay it. The fundamental problem is that while developer resources grow linearly, communication channels between developers grow exponentially. Rails enables fewer people to get more work done, but working with other developers on a team is inevitable for any non-trivial project. This talk will address some best practices for working with others on Rails projects, including such topics as: managing migrations; continuous integration and testing; managing libraries, plug-ins and gems; loading your application's initial data; documentation; and source control. Of course, these problems are not unique to Rails, but Rails imparts its own spin on the best practices.
About Luke
Luke Francl is a Rails developer at Slantwise Design, where he's worked on projects both big and small. Prior to coming to Rails he was the lead developer for an enterprise digital asset management system written in Java. Luke is a frequent presenter at the Ruby Users of Minnesota, and has also presented at CodeCon 2002, the Twin Cities Code Camp, MinneBar, and Ostrava on Rails. He blogs at Rail Spikes.
