Improving the Rails Experience, Part 1: Help vampires, mogwai, and you
Amy Hoy nailed it with Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide, plus she came up with cute little graphics to make her point. For whatever reason, I find cute little graphics incredibly persuasive.
Rails: As seen on TV
I spent a week or so hanging out in #rubyonrails before getting tired of answering the same questions over and over again (or trying to explain why a question was unanswerable), and I think that part of the influx of huge-question-demanding newbies has to do with the excellent marketing that DHH and the crowd at 37signals has done for Rails–specifically the idea of scaffolding and the mind-blowing videos circa 0.13. The video demos tap into the age-old (well, okay, maybe like 40 years old) desire to abstract the actual programming into thin air, and visions of programming a fully functional shopping cart in a single day flash before people’s eyes. They bang around with scaffolding before finally realizing there is no ––do-the-work-for-me switch for rails, at which point they end up in #rubyonrails or a forum somewhere, asking the ineffable, and effing the answerers.
Mr. Wing was right
Amy does a great job of analyzing these folks–”help vampires,” she calls them, with a remarkable amount of restraint–but they’re only one component in a a larger system. Rails newbies are like unsuspecting mogwai–big eyes, fluffy, and utterly clueless. Somewhere along the line, they turn into gremlins–help vampires–and start demanding help, tearing up the couch, and tossing popcorn about all willy-nilly. It’s important to know how to handle a gremlin, but there’s a deeper question at hand: who the hell’s been feeding the little buggers after midnight? (For those of you who haven’t seen Gremlins, I mean “what turns a Rails newbie into a help vampire?”)
Fixing that what is broke
One of the first things you learn in conflict resolution is that when people repeat themselves it’s because they don’t feel heard. One of the first things you learn about usability is that when the same problem pops up often it’s because the product is flawed. And one of the last things you learn about technical support is that when the same stupid question rears its head over and over and over again it’s because the answer is probably tucked away in a wiki, sandwiched between blackjack spams, and preceeded by a Flash splash screen which says “beware of leopard.”
So what’s the solution? How do we make it easier for people to jump in with both feet into the Rails experience? How do we turn curious newcomers into tattoo-sporting diehards? How do we make everything outside of the code as beautiful as the stuff on the inside?
Stay tuned
Over the next few days I’ll detail my ideas for making the Rails experience more welcoming and productive. I promise you now they’re good ideas–worth reading, even. I’d love to hear from you all about some of the strong and weak points you’ve experienced with the Rails community, and I’m curious to hear what you all think we should do about it.
Next up: it’s so hard to find good help these days…
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