shoes to the rescue

a story of frustration and redemption

In the last two days I feel like I’ve been through both the worst and best sides of being a software developer.

frustration:
Yesterday started off as a day of possibilities. Another day to build really great stuff that I’m proud of and hopefully helps a few people out. Instead it was riddled with a host of issues on my own laptop including a hosed Ruby 1.8.7 upgrade, Readline compile failures, $PATH issues, a crashing IDE and a general feeling of crankiness. A lot of people, including myself, have talked about how exciting it is to code, especially in Ruby. How the philosophy is so different, and it is. But I couldn’t help but get the feeling that software development in general is still in its infancy — that some things that should be simple are not. It feels like we are still hand-cranking the Model-T to get it started. We’ve come a long way and are helping a lot of people, but we’ve got a long way to go before we are driving an all-electric Mini Cooper.

redemption:
Today was a much different day. My issues from the previous day had been fixed by yesterday’s end, but I purposely stayed away from them. Instead, I discussed some new projects, I sketched up a fairly complex ERD diagram for a current project, and did some other technology blog reading. In that reading I ran across what I think is my favorite piece of software in a long time. And the thing is, it’s really, really simple. It doesn’t have a business model in mind. It doesn’t force you to install this gem, and patch this file, and alter this permission and configure this setting. It isn’t pretentious.

It’s called shoes. Yes, shoes. I think the name could have something to do with Ruby Slippers, but I’m not sure. If you don’t like dabbling in a little bit of code, this application isn’t for you. But what it does, it does right. To use shoes, you write little snippets of Ruby, and have them run on a desktop. The person running the program doesn’t need Ruby installed or anything else for that matter. It will run on OS X, Windows and Linux. It’s fun, beautiful and simple. Thank you Shoes, and thank you _why.