While I know the title is both asking for trouble (because of the now anecdotal original article with a similar title) and flamebaity, please read on - my goal is not to get some great stats but rather to know your opinion about the situation and discuss the possible solutions of the problem.

How it all started…

I would not like to re-iterate what has been said on several blogs, just to summarize: Matt Aimonetti, member of the Rails Activists, gave a presentation at GoGaRuCo which contained sexually explicit images (according to some - I am not here to judge whether that’s true, and it doesn’t matter anyway, as you’ll see in the rest of the post).

I am not really discussing whether it’s appropriate to have images of nude chicks in your presentation at a Ruby conference (I think it’s not, it’s unprofessional etc. - but that would be a matter of a different post Update: Someone summed this up in the article’s reddit thread nicely: If you’re a Rails programmer, or a Ruby programmer, and you don’t decry this sort of thing, you have no business calling yourself a professional. It doesn’t matter how large your website is, how easy it was to write, how much better it is over PHP or ASP.NET or J2EE; by definition, you do not belong to a professional community. That’s all there is to it. It’s incumbent on every Ruby programmer to either reject this sort of misogynistic sewage, or accept that you’re never going to advance the promotion of Rails in the public perception because members of the community still think it’s edgy or cool to put pictures of strippers in their public presentations. And here’s a hint: if your decided reaction is to talk about how unimportant this is, how much it doesn’t matter, or how much it doesn’t offend you personally, you probably don’t understand professionalism at all.) because sadly, I think there are far bigger problems here than that - shedding light on them is the real purpose of the article, not talking about pr0n at GoGaRuCo again.

Would You Walk Into a Hindu Temple with Your Shoes on?

I have been living in India for 2 months last summer, working on a Rails startup. Maybe I am odd or something, but I knew that I had to remove my shoes when entering a Hindu temple, and no one had to convince me (what’s more, I didn’t even think about it for a second) wether this is the right thing to do, why is it so, whether I should do otherwise etc. This is a similar situation - I just don’t do X when speaking at a conference, if I suspect that X makes feel even one person in the room uncomfortable, whether because of his gender, race, nationality, Ruby/Rails skills, penis size or what have you - regardless whether I think it’s fine for me, my wife, for other members of the community and/or the majority of the room.

The trick is, how does a hindu feel when I enter a temple in footwear (even if that is perfectly acceptable in my country, culture, family, friends) - it’s perfectly irrelevant how do I feel in the given situation. Using the previous paragraph, try to apply this to a Ruby/Rails conference.

Shit happens…

Until this point in the story, I see no problem at all, and could even agree with the guys asking “what’s wrong with you, don’t make a fuss out of nothing” - the pictures Matt used are non-problematic in my book, and he had no idea they are problematic in anyone’s book - theoretically it could have worked, but the point is, it did not. Some members of the Ruby community got offended, and here our story begins.

…and hits the fan

One of the real problems is that after this has been pointed out, Matt still keeps answering “As mentioned many times earlier, I don’t think my presentation is inappropriate.”. As I mentioned two paragraph above, it doesn’t matter what do you think, unless of course, you don’t care about offending some members of the community. In that case you should not try to apologize at all. However, if you are trying, reciting “I don’t think my presentation is inappropriate” will not put and end to the discussion. It just doesn’t work. Why can’t you just simply apologize, admitting that this was a bad move (because it offended some, not because porn, sexual images or whatever in presentations are bad, per se) and finish the discussion?

Rails is Still a Ghetto

However, in my opinion that’s still not the worst part of the story, or to put it differently, some members of the Rails community still found a way to make things worse, by applauding to all this:

OK, you say, we are all used to DHH’s style, this is just how the guy is. That’s (kind of) cool, but I heard that most of the Rails core team (and obviously Matt himself) has the same opinion - and that’s a much more serious problem, because it means that a Rails activist, backed by DHH and other Rails core members finds all this OK, despite of the fact that numerous people in the community voiced their opinion otherwise.

This is not about being a closed-minded prude, shouting for police and suing everyone using sexually explicit images in a presentation. This is not even about women, as I have seen both males and females on either side of the fence. This is about mutual respect - I don’t agree with you, but respect your feelings. Or not, as demonstrated in this case.

So Rails continues to be the most socially unacceptable framework - associated with arrogance, elitism and whatnot in the past - now add pr0n images in presentations. Thankfully RailsConf is held in Las Vegas, and that should calm down all the people who associate Rails with all this crap :-). The real problem is that people associate you with the tools you are using - think Cobol, PHP, Java… or Rails. By being part of the Rails community people associate me with Railsy stereotypes automatically, which aren’t nice at all right now.

I hear you, dear creme-de-la-creme Rails (core) member, I know you don’t give a shit, and you think this is all prude babbling - because your hourly rate is more than some of us earn in a day, and you’ll be sought after even if Rails will have a much worse image than it has now. But 99.9% of us are not in the ‘circle of trust’ and would be happier if Rails would not be constantly associated with a ghetto.

MINASWUBN

In case you are wondering what does the acronym stand for, it’s “Matz is Nice And So We Used to Be Nice”. Unfortunately, the stuff I don’t like about the Rails community is sneaking into Ruby too, it seems, as the above case demonstrates. Besides this, the count of aggressive comments and reactions on various blog posts is really disturbing to me. Please (at least Rubyists) try to avoid being contaminated by all this shit and stop thinking you are cool because you can swear on a forum (always in anonymity). You don’t have to be a douchebag just because you are a Rubyist / Rails coder, as surprising as this might sound to some.

Conclusion

I think “incidents” like this and getting more and more antisocial members are inevitable by-products of growth in a community. The questions is, whether, and if, how, do we stop them. The problem is that it seems to me the Rails “top management” doesn’t want to stop them (what’s more, even encourages them) in the first place (please prove me otherwise - maybe I don’t see the full story - I’ll be the happiest to admit that I am talking bullshit).

I have to admit I have no clue what would be the right move - burying our heads in the sand and pretending everything is fine is not. Please leave a comment if you have an idea or anything to add.

When I tried to integrate one of our applications with SMS messages (both incoming and outgoing) several years ago we didn't manage to find not even one SMS gateway provider that would be able to pass our simple criteria. Allow sending (da :-) and receiving of messages with some reasonable notification of received messages (simple webservice / forward to email, anything). The replies should preferably be handled by a local number and sending/forwarding should be within reasonable price range :-) Is it too much to ask?

There is a number of online portals for sending (some support also receiving) SMSes like Clickatel, SMSZilla, SMSCountry. Their pricing per message varies from SGD0.05 - 0.1 which is quite reasonable and some provide nice and easy API for sending (when you think about it how complicated can it get to write a form handler with 3 or 4 fields) - some ask you to pay for API extra. For better or worse they would accomplish the sending but the receiving was either very painful or expensive or both. On top of that sending a hundred messages to and Indian or US number shows on your bill so we had to find something better.

For systems that require only sending we mostly used Singtel Ideas or Starhub Gee. Both are just a little short of and actual webservice, nevertheless worked quite well. Here's an example how to send message using StarHub Gee (12345678 is your phone number)

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

mech = WWW::Mechanize.new
page = mech.get('http://groupsms.starhubgee.com.sg/VCRLS/login.cgi?cb=http%3A%2F%2Fgroupsms.starhubgee.com.sg%2Fcgi-bin%2Fs.pl')

#login first
form = page.form('loginform')
form.action = "https://login.starhubgee.com.sg/eam/login"
form['cb'] = 'http://groupsms.starhubgee.com.sg/cgi-bin/s.pl'
form['vcid'] = 'groupsms'
form['pudn'] = 'starhubgee'
form['domain'] = 'starhubgee'

form['fake_uid'] = '12345678'
form['uid'] = '12345678@starhubgee'
form['password'] = 'password'

page = mech.submit(form)  

page = mech.get("http://groupsms.starhubgee.com.sg/cgi-bin/s.pl")
form = page.form('compose')
form['to']='comma separated recipients numbers'

form['message']= "Your message...."

page = mech.submit(form)

This would take care of sending with much lower cost as it utilizes bundled SMSes in the package (400 - 1000 messages) with nothing else required. The problem, however, was still receiving. A little glimpse of hope was SMS+ introduced by SingTel last year, which allows you to auto forward your received messages to email address. This would have been ideal - if not for a small glitch - it only works with messages sent from SingTel numbers. OH MY GOOOOOD!!!!!!!! I almost cried when I found out that.

Lately I found a nice and simple Singaporean provider www.gsmexchange.com able to handle 2 way communication. Nothing to say about sending - just send a http request with username, password, phone numbers and message and you will receive message ID that you can use for tracking. Replies are slightly more complicated as I didn't find any API for reading replies - nevertheless - there is a list page that you can parse with mechanize to get the responses. There is an option to forward messages to email but for 5c per message it's a bit too expensive. Actually, also pricing for sending of the messages is on the higher end 10c per message which makes it much less attractive for our customers.

Luckily I managed to find a much cheaper solution - running my own SMS server :-) See the next post...