I have to confess upfront that I will not be cutting all links to the world of Microsoft, just yet… My experience and knowledge of the Rails technology stack is limited at present so I need to fund this knowledge/community enlightenment through consulting in the MS space.

Mike Gunderloy seems to be making the jump lock stock and barrel – i’m a little to scared for that and my wife would probably not take to kindly to the introduction of the ‘Tesco Value Loaf’ :)

i work in a totally ASP.NET workplace that’s 100% not interested in alternative web frameworks, languages or platforms. only a strategic business decision from the very top to add LAMP (or whatever) to our capabilities would change that fact.

primarily i’m learning Rails because it’s great fun, and that has ALWAYS been my primary reason for doing ANYTHING technological. whatever i do in my day job, i think this will make me a better programmer – every time i learn something new about Rails, i wonder about how i can bring that into my ASP.Net development. if Rails really takes off for me, perhaps my next job (or at least one of my next freelance side projects) could be one that lets me do Rails or something similar.

You need to watch Dave Thomas’ keynote from RailsConf Europe: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7327520943909344563

I like his quote from Martin Fowler: “If you can’t change your organization, change your organization.”

Jon, I know what you mean, though. We worship at the alter of Bill too (and ESRI), but fortunately my boss is very open-minded and is encouraging me to use Rails when appropriate.

Here’s one way I sneaked it into the system….I was building an address management app for a city and they needed to convert their legacy address data into our new database schema. The data was completely denormalized. I wrote a Ruby script using ActiveRecord to parse the data, and write everything to the new database. It worked great. It took a couple of hours to convert 14,000+ records, but there was a lot going on. My justification was that we were already over budget by this point and using Ruby for the task would definitely save money.

Ah, that’s the $64 question, isn’t it?

As for me, yes, I am leaving the world of Microsoft completely. Well, I should say that’s the plan. I’ve given myself the year 2007 to determine whether that can be made reality, and I’ve taken some steps to ensure that I work seriously on making it so (primarily by spending enough money up-front that I’ll feel like an ass if I can’t make the transition).

For me, the major issue is with Microsoft’s business practices. I should note that I come out of a left political background, which contributes to my analysis of the situation, but briefly, it seems more and more to me that Microsoft is acting in ways that, if left unchecked, will limit my own future freedom as a developer. Most worrisome to me are their increasingly bold land grabs in the intellectual property arena, as capped by their claims over the Office 2007 look and feel. If unchallenged, we’ll end up in a world where developers cannot develop. I do not think this is a good thing, and to the extent that I can prevent it, I would like to do so. To be blunt, I feel that every time I do anything that contributes to Microsoft’s bottom line – whether it be using their software, recommending it to a customer, or working directly for them as a contractor – I am acting in ways that are contrary to my own long-term best interest.

Of course Microsoft works really hard to try and cover this up and make it possible to ignore this by producing a lot of good software, but in the final analysis, I find myself in the same moral position as a pacifist working in a napalm factory. Your mileage may vary, of course – and I realize that reasonable people can disagree violently with this view of the world. My current boss and I have had several firm disagreements over this.

Anyhow, there’s no doubt in my mind that switching to Rails (or other non-Microsoft stuff – as those of you reading A Fresh Cup know, I’m investigating other nooks and crannies as well) will result in a big income hit. Sticking with my current day job is simply impossible; it’s 100% Microsoft technology and not going to switch, or even allow non-Microsoft tech as an alternative. And the Larkware site will clearly be another casualty – already there is stuff I’m not covering because I’m not spending any time with Vista, Office 2007, Orcas, WPF, LINQ, and so on. So that’s 90% of my income down the drain right there. It is unlikely in the extreme that I will waltz into a position in the Rails world after a year with the sort of seniority and income potential that I’ve grown to enjoy after 15 years of working with the Microsoft stack.

Fortunately, I’ve got a very understanding wife, and she brings in a not-insignignificant income from her own business. And there are some things going on in our life financially that will lower our expenses dramatically over the next 12 months. So it’s possible that I can pull this off and still not have to resort to the Tesco Value Loaf more than, say, three weeks out of five. But it’s going to be an exciting race…

I’ll add to that by confessing that I never set out to replace my career in Microsoft-land with Rails. I started with a small pet project, took on a couple small side consulting gigs, and, like Chris, started sneaking Ruby into the system at my day-job. I just eventually found developing with C# so slow and painful that I wanted to stop. And by that time, I had all the experience I needed to sell myself into real, income-replacing consulting projects. Quitting MS cold turkey is not easy, especially with a family that’s depending on your income, and probably not the right way to go about taking a new career path in Rails.

One reason I’m keeping one foot in Microsoftland is because I really like developing desktop software for various reasons, and I don’t feel like learning Objective-C/Cocoa for the Mac. There’s apparently a thing called RubyCocoa but it’s disappointing me so far – it’s not really a Ruby wrapper on top of Cocoa, it’s more like a pinvoke layer if you will.

When I can find a way to easily write desktop software for the Mac, then that will probably be the final straw. Until then my primary machine at home will be WinXP (no Vista for me, thank you very much).

What an interesting topic. Like some of the others, I never intended to immediately replace my job in .NET or Java with Ruby. I find the “sneaking in” approach is necessary for most established companies. Switching platforms cold turkey is a big no no in the corporate world where I have been. But sneaking in a few scripts or small admin apps can be successful.

As for me, I like Rails, and like the potential. I like that although I still don’t know much I can get an app up and running. .NET requires a lot of time and financial investments that Rails avoids. Java requires a lot of setup time. However, both of these are widely accepted. Since I like to have a paycheck I have to adhere to that. Personally, my goal is to become a triple threat: .NET, Java, and Ruby. I can see reasons for all three of these at most of the gigs I have had.

Eventually, I think it would be grand to do Rails full time. But I need a bit more time with it. The number of potential employers using Rails vs .NET/Java is substantially different.

Rails makes me a better developer regardless, so it is a win win.

From the responses so far it seems that most are taking a similar approach to me. My view is what the heck, if I get nothing else other than some exposure to a different technology stack and a different view on how good frameworks should be built then I will be no worse off.

It would be really good to check back here in 6 and 12 months time to see how things have moved on for people. Mike I’ll be really interested to see how you get on with the both feet first approach.

Well, “both feet first” amounts to pulling the rip cord and having a deadline for a firm decision – my current job is guaranteed through 31 December 2007 if I want to stay that long (and they would like to keep me longer). So I’ve got a fallback if I can’t make a go of doing what I’d like to do. Sure hope I don’t need to use it though.

I’m a software development manager that has a dozen .Net developers working for me. Like most development managers, I started my life as a developer. I started to move into Microsoft technologies for web development back in the mid ‘90s. After doing Microsoft for years, I’m ready for a change. Since my job doesn’t directly involve coding anymore, I’ve been trying to keep up by coding .Net at home for kicks.

After a year or so of trying this, I’m throwing in the towel on Microsoft for my own personal projects. The overhead required to build a web application is just too much. While I like the OO, exception management, try/catch constructs and the debugging that ASP.Net has over old school ASP, I feel like I’ve lost a lot of the fun. The fun of writing a web application has been replaced with the drudgery of writing an enterprise application. And while enterprise applications might pay the bills, they don’t make my heart sing! :) Ruby on Rails gives me all of the benefits of working with an advanced language and platform while still allowing me to be productive quickly. Who can argue with that?

Anyways, I’ve bought a MacBook Pro, stocked my library with RoR texts, drank the kool-aid and started to change my life. Of course, I’ll still be managing .Net developers at work and will continue to do that for the foreseeable future. But you can bet that I’ll be looking to make RoR part of some future project so that I can get my hands dirty on company time rather than just on my own time. :)

I’m more with Brian on this one, although at this point I’m not interested in consulting. For me, it will probably be a process. I’ve tried a few side projects myself in the past, but they were not thought out very well….so they obviously did not work out. For now, I’m excited to report that I’m founding a new group (through Meetup.com) for those of us south of Seattle. Our first meeting is Monday; hopefully it will go well. What really surprises me about Ruby and Rails is how quickly you get hooked. We all had (or have) a reasonable skepticism about Rails; it is natural. I have a newfound interesting in technology because of Rails and the ideas that are coming from its creators.

One of the dirty little secrets about Microsoft technology is the dependence of other software industries on that MS tech. My group’s focus is on GIS software (and hence, ESRI). ESRI technology is very Microsoft-centric, although they also support Java but much less so. If you leave MS, then you leave GIS for the most part. It sucks, and I’m trying to find ways to integrate Ruby, but it’s hard technically and politically. And I’m sure there are other industries in the same predicament. So, practically, I don’t see myself leaving the MS world entirely…more likely just tolerating it, and using Ruby/Rails whenever possible.

Chris, couldn’t agree more. My vertical specialty is in hospitality/retail, where everything is all Microsoft, all the time. Had to actually start my own company in order to use Rails :)