the Onda

Ned has jumped into the fray on web application frameworks and this reminded me that just about a year ago when we were getting Tabblo off the ground, my head was spinning (or more specifically my laptop was) with every web framework known to man to see which one we'd begin with. At the time my thought was that we would use one of the frameworks to get started and then abandon it as we needed to scale the site to something beyond a prototype/early alpha.

So it's been a pleasant surprise to see that we've been able to stick with Django for the last year and even through a couple of massive spikes in traffic (something I am fairly sure that we would not have been able to do with some of the other contenders I considered so kudos to the Django guys).

However, Ned's post brought back all the memories of reading reams of commentary on all sides of web frameworks and passionate arguments around how "game changing" this or that was, and how software development was never going to be the same again. He does a good job of debunking most of this as the crap, so instead I just wanted to mention one of the greatest benefits I think we've seen from using a "fringy" framework like Django.

If you get passionate about your tools– passionate enough to try new things, get into the fray on the discussion, and always be looking critically at everything that comes down the pike, you're probably the type of engineer who thinks hard about tradeoffs and the "whys" behind decisions which means you are most likely also to do very well coming up with the right answers to some of the harder (softer) questions that Ned has on his post. In other words, getting people who are passionate about their web frameworks, especially when these frameworks are not part of the mainstream "career advancing" canon, is a great way to pre-select for the types of people who will thrive and do really well in small team environments. This isn't always true– and interestingly enough, as the tool/framework gains acceptance (something which should be considered a "good thing"), it's value as a preselector rapidly decreases (what Java monkey doesn't "totally love Ruby on Rails" these days?).

It reminds me of a story that I've heard third-hand about the way that Steve Jobs did recruiting at NEXT. When asked what he was looking for in hardware engineers, he supposedly said "engineers that understand surface mounted board assembly," and we he was asked why that specifically, his response was "it's easy: the best hardware engineers all want to work with surface mounted components, so that is why we want them." When I first heard this story I thought, what an idiot! but working in the Django ecosystem has taught me that this type of self selection can be much more beneficial to a startup than URL dispatchers, ORMs or any of the other stuff that comes with a web framework.