We have the inventor of Ruby on Rails coming to our internal developer conference next week. I've heard a bit about it, didn't know much about it, so I went to the website to glean a bit of information about it.

After about an hour, I've deduced that Ruby on Rails is a lot of hype; scenic landscapes; greased, eurocool hair; and more hype.

Having browsed other sites since then, I've figured out that it's a framework for generating web pages on the fly, much like PHP or Perl/Mason, and other stuff that I'm generally not interested in.

The testimonials, though, talk about how easy it is to edit live websites, see your changes instantly, etc., and skip the develop/test/deploy/test cycle. This seems a tad dangerous (and we go through great lengths to prohibit this at Amazon).

To sum up... .

Meanwhile, my workload, which was supposed to get lighter after the end of the year, has continued to get heavier. I am less than pleased. We managed to snatch a project out of the clenched jaws of defeat (mainly because some of the other service owners failed to own up to their commitments), though with much agony (including having to essentially forego Christmas). As a result, it's been decided that this is an acceptable working environment for us. We have a new client coming on board, the launch date has been set, but the requirements and specs are long overdue from the account management team. In short, they've eaten a month out of our development time and we still don't know what we're building.