Glenn Vanderburg is featured in today’s erubycon interview.

Glenn Vanderburg Answers

Glenn Vanderburg has over 20 years of experience as a software developer, working in diverse environments using a wide variety of languages and tools, including Java, C and C++, Perl, Tcl, and more. His career spans large enterprises, universities, and startups. He caught the Ruby bug in 2000, and has never enjoyed programming so much.

Here are Glenn’s answers:

Q: Tell me a little about your background, where you are working and how did you come to start using Ruby?

I’ve been a programmer for 20 years now, and I’ve worked in a wide variety of enterprises, with many different technologies. I’ve just hung up my independent consultant hat to join Relevance, LLC (where I’m be a semi-independent consultant).

In late 2000 I was a regular at a Dallas-area lunch discussion group focused on “Extreme Programming and related topics” (i.e., what we would now call agile software development). Dave Thomas was also a regular there, and he mentioned to us that he and Andy were working on a book about Ruby. I was able to go to the OOPSLA conference that year, where the first edition of the PickAxe was released, and bought a copy on release day. I was hooked immediately.

Q: What unique opportunities do you see for Ruby in the enterprise?

I blogged recently that I think Ruby and Rails help good programmers to become better—partly through just being well-designed and powerful, partly through providing good examples and assistance in doing the right thing, and partly through having a community and culture that values good design and clean, expressive code. I think good, solid design and code are crucial for enterprise software. Enterprises, however, have historically undervalued those things, largely because it’s been so tempting to believe that tools and technologies will solve all the problems. I think we in the Ruby community have a chance to bring much-needed simplicity back to enterprise systems, and remind enterprises that there’s no substitute for skilled people with good tools.

Q: What obstacles do you see to getting Ruby used more in enterprise software?

Large enterprises have a pretty solid division of labor between those whose job it is to get work done and those who are supposed to prevent mistakes. Those in the first group will be drawn to Ruby as a powerful tool that helps them work faster, but those in the second group always try to resist change. And to some degree they’re right to resist. But because they aren’t accountable for the work getting done, they might hold out much longer than they should, hurting the organization in the process. The best strategy against such resistance is for all of us to go public with our Ruby success stories (and there are a lot of them already).

Q: Play oracle for a moment and tell me what you see as the next “Big Thing” in software development.

There are a lot of people these days wondering whether Apollo or Silverlight will mean the end of web applications, but I don’t think that will happen. My prediction is that new kinds of devices (including smartphones, pads, multitouch screens, and even large- scale displays) will require revising our assumptions about user interfaces, and that will require developers (yes, even enterprise developers) to learn some new techniques. Two-handed input, pervasive animation, and other innovations will cause a lot of upheaval among application developers.

Q: What erubycon talk are you most interested in hearing?

I can’t wait to hear Neal Ford discuss Mingle.

Thank You

Thanks Glenn.

For more information on the conference, see erubycon.com.