New Year’s Eve is the time where we look back at the year that has just passed and reflect about it for the next one. That’s the time we slow down a bit and allow ourselves to see what did we do, what difference did we make, and if we are still headed towards the right direction.

Fortunately, everything I’ve deemed important (technology-wise) was bookmarked at my del.icio.us/fabioakita account. I invite everybody to subscribe to it or just take a peek. I’ve selected just a few that represents some of the most interesting events this year (at least from my point of view).

For me, 2007 was a tremendous year, no complains. I worked like crazy in the last few months, but at least I am proud that I made an educated decision more than a year ago and stuck with it. And guess what? It paid off in spades! The book I published in September, 2006 was a success, I am working full time with the great guys at Surgeworks LLC and I now have a local brazilian team of my own, with 3 fellow Railers (follow the links to get to know them).

I’ve attended to no less than 5 brazilian Rails gatherings, one every weekend since November 17th. It was great to see the brazilian Ruby on Rails community flourishing. And I hope that 2008 is the year where people finally start to notice us down here.

My Rails 2.0 Screencast was a huge success, achieving world-wide recognition (see the Google Analytics graph below). I’ve made great friends like Dr. Nic, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Satish Talim and more. (Read the exclusive interviews here)

More important of all: I was able to drift away from the mainstream and do what I wanted to do. I wanted to do Rails full time, and I got it. That’s the way to go: do whatever it is that you really want, not what other people tell you to do. You have to know better! And education is key: the only way to make a good decision for yourself.

Retrospective

January 2nd – YARV é Ruby, Ele é, Ele realmente é

• We started 2007 with high expectations towards Ruby 1.9, it took a year for it to fly, now it’s time to analyze what we’ve got and pave the way for Ruby 2.0.

January 19th – Rails 1.2: REST admiration, HTTP lovefest, and UTF-8 celebrations

• We just got Rails 2.0 but it was less than a year that we put our hands on 1.2 and the all the RESTful paradigm shift. People are still struggling to understand this concept but I hope it persists.

January 23rd – Mongrel 1.0 – Lançado!

• Who would imagine, today, that even Mongrel wasn’t 1.0 stable almost a year back? That’s how fast we are riding today.

February 14th – Healthcare Startup Takes Rails Mainstream

• Big endeavors are betting on Rails. Steve Case, ex-AOL CEO founded Revolution Health, and his team made good contributions to the community, with Rails plugins, information. It is a very well made website and it runs on Rails.

February 19th – What’s New in Edge Rails: Cookie Based Sessions are the New Default

• Rails 1.2 just went out but Ryan Daigle was relentless: he started dissecting Rails 2.0 very early on. I highly recommend his series “What’s New in Edge Rails”.

March 6th – Behind The Scenes: JRuby 0.9.8 Released!

• Another project that wasn’t 1.0 stable less than a year ago. Charles Nutter and the JRuby Core Team should gain some award named “The most productive programmers of the year”. It was amazing to witness how fast they evolved with JRuby. And they attended to several events all over the world: USA, Europe, even Japan! I wish I had their speed and quality.

March 23th – ‘Drop Rails into TomCat and it just works’ – Ola Bini on JRuby presentation

• As JRuby 1.0 was approaching people wondered if a Rails app could actually run over a Java Application Server. Ola Bini – from the JRuby Core Team – was one of the first to show it happening.

March 27th – Getting Real: tradução completa! Chegamos ao 1.0!

• The 37signals’ “Getting Real” book was so great I decided to tackle on the challenge to translate it for the brazilian audience. I was fortunate enough to be able to gather a very competent team and with that goal in mind, we were the 1st country to have a full translation of this book. Kudos for our community.

March 27th – Off Topic: Ameaças de Morte contra Kathy Sierra

• I still can’t believe there are no more Kathy Sierra articles to read. That was a very sad day for the whole community. She was one of my favorite writers, but after being threatened she decided to drop her online activities. I hope all is well with her.

March 29th – Sexy Migrations

• One of the newest features of Rails 2.0 is what’s called ‘Sexy Migrations’. But the original plugin was released way back, in March. And actually, this plugin is more full featured. You can use it in your Rails 1.2 apps if you will.

April 13th – Magic Multi-Connections: A ‘facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time’

• Alex Payne caused a lot of polemic after an interview where he said Rails wasn’t cutting it for Twitter. That was a PR nightmare, that’s for sure. DHH himself got in the discussion. But it wasn’t until like 24 or 48 hours later when Dr. Nic released his Magic Multi-Connections, the the discussion was settled. The answer? Yes, Rails can scale beyond what was assumed of.

May 2nd – Softies on Rails: REST 101: Part 5 – Respond!

• Even to this day lots of people are scratching their heads over what this REST fuss is all about. Fortunately several articles and tutorials emerged to help, like this series of 5 articles from Jeff Cohen.

May 7th – Hobo – The web app builder for Rails

• And the creativity never stops. Hobo was a very innovative new way of superseding the Rails standard approach, taking scaffolding to a whole new level. It still didn’t achieve 1.0 level and I don’t hear much about it nowadays. I hope they are still developing it because the idea was great.

May 7th – InfoQ: Mingle from ThoughtWorks is Big Win for JRuby

• ThoughtWorks wants to be the first and they want it all. They were the very first mainstream company to release a full featured products – Mingle – to run over JRuby. With full support. That gave a lot of credibility to the JRuby project. Ola Bini, a Core Team member was hired to work there this year.

May 10th – ActiveScaffold goes Gold: 1.0 Released!

• Another great way to get up to speed with Rails development. If the standard scaffold is just too crude, you can try this new plugin (called ‘AjaxScaffold’, the first time I tried it). It will create very nice Ajax-based admin CRUD screens for you. Definitely deserves a try.

May 14th – Scaling Twitter » SlideShare

• After the dust went away, we can now rejoice our Twitter activities and see what were the lessons learned scalling something as big as Twitter. They sure have a lot of experience to share.

May 14th – How to deploy a self contained Rails application on Tomcat, painlessly!

• Deploying Rails apps over any JEE container became easier and easier all the the time! Maybe it’s now easier to deploy over Glassfish, than create a usual mongrel cluster set up.

May 16th – Novidade! Akita na Surgeworks

• In May, I was really depressed with my current work. My former employer revealed himself as a thief and then Surgeworks showed up, in the middle of the turmoil. That certainly ‘rescued’ my year. I am very thankful being able to do what I like, full-time.

May 17th – RailsConf 2007 – Day 1

• Another RailsConf. Every year this event gets more and more crowd. Gatherings that began with the 50 ~ 100 people range, now became full conferences with hundreds or thousands of people attending. It still amazes me.

May 20th – Rails Envy: Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails…

• The guys from Rails Envy, Gregg Polack and Jason Seifer stood up with their cunningly funny Mac-like ads for Ruby on Rails. Provocative, yes. But funny, indeed. And now they also have a very good Podcast. These guys from Orlando did shake the community a bit.

June 4th – Giles Bowkett: Rails Scalability: Real-World Solutions

• This year, many new projects started, lots of new products were released and we investigated and learned a lot about scaling Rails applications. If you search on Google you will find several excellent articles about it. This one above being just one of them.

June 4th – Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3

• Amazon was at the fore front this year. Not only with the recent release of Kindle, but with their massive online services as EC2 and S3 – and now SimpleDB. They literally changed the way we think about website hosting and Railers jumped into this bandwagon rather quickly. You now have a lot of material about hosting over EC2+S3 with Rails.

June 4th – Rail Spikes: Merb

• Ezra is definitely my number one reference for Rails deployment and performance. He makes witty remarks and his product Merb showed up to demonstrate that Rails has the potential to become much faster than it currently is. I do recommend Merb for those edgy scenarios where performance is key.

June 10th – Meu Primeiro Teste com JRuby 1.0

• As everybody else I was very excited about JRuby 1.0 being released so I did my own home-brew test running Redmine over Glassfish, and guess what? It did work!

June 18th – Rails Watcher. Ubuntu Feisty + Rails + Nginx + Mongrel + Mongrel Cluster

• First it was CGI (not used anymore, thankfully). Then it was FastCGI and LightTPD and Apache. Mongrel turned the table with HTTP Reverse Proxying. Now we found out about this Russian lightweight, easy to use and very fast web server called Nginx. Now every deployment recipe mentions Nginx and I do recommend you take a look.

June 22th – Riding Rails: Capistrano 2.0

• SwitchTower became Capistrano and with it we learned a no pain deployment procedure. Automation is the key for you not losing a night of sleep. And Capistrano 2.0 makes is clear that we don’t have to manually do everything all the time.

June 24th – David Heinemeier Hansson says No to Use of Rails Logo

• DHH finally stated about the fair use of the Rails Logo: no profitable endeavor should use the Rails Logo without his own approval. Non-profit events and such are allowed though.

July 7th – Akita lança plugin: Acts As Replica

• That was the first time I released a Rails plugin. And it is certainly one of the most complicated plugins ever – and still unfinished. I am attempting a full database replication over HTTP for client-server scenarios. It works, but could use some help :-)

July 8th – Hanselminutes: Entrevista com David Hansson e Martin Fowler

• Scott Hanselman is one of those developers that are open minded: he works with Microsoft tools and technologies, but he does research other approaches. So, he was at RailsConf and was able to record one of the best interviews ever, with both DHH and Martin Fowler. Highly recommended.

July 30th – Three years with Ruby on Rails

• It’s amazing to think that 3 years had passed already. In the beginning people disregarded Rails as something doomed to disappear. How shocked they are today with all the success that Rails achieved on its own. Congratulations to the whole Rails community world-wide that was responsible for this.

September 4th – RubyWorks Production Stack

• Again, deployment was a recurrent theme this year. Many companies released full stacks to easy the deployment. RubyWorks was one of them. It is worth giving it a try for a painless deployment procedure.

September 18th – Fingerprints of Casper Fabricius » RailsConf: The DHH keynote – Rails 2.0 update

• At RailsConf 2007 Europe, DHH made a great keynote highlighting the main features of Rails 2.0. By this time we already had the Preview Release, waiting to see the Release Candidates coming down the pipe.

September 22nd – Jogar Pedra em Gato Morto: por que Subversion não presta

• For some reason, GIT got a lot of attention this year. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t see such a hype with Mercurial, Darcs or other distributed SCM. Everybody knows Subversion and take it for granted, but GIT shakes the SCM world a bit. Rubinius changed its repository to GIT and I see others talking about it or using it. I tried and it was great! Highly recommended.

October 1st – Migrando Mephisto para Rails 2.0: AkitaOnRails 2.0 Preview

• With the Rails 2.0 Preview Release at hand, it was time to test it. So I did: I updated my blog’s Mephisto to Rails 2.0 Preview and actually deployed it! I never had the time to look back again, but right now you’re reading this article over a 3 months old Rails 2.0 app :-)

November 10th – Nullcreations | Installing ruby mysql gem in OSX 10.5

• Apple Leopard was one of the products I bought this year (along with the Apple TV, iPhone Mac Mini, iPods – yeah, I spend too much). With it came a full stack of Ruby products as Rails and Mongrel. But it was missing MySQL and there were a few quircks to deal with. A few articles documented those.

December 10th – The First Rails 2.0 Screencast

• Rails 2.0 was finally released! And less than 3 days later I was able to publish a screencast (both in english and portuguese) running through all the main features of Rails 2.0 while building a mini-blog (DHH style) in less than 30 minutes. It was a huge success! Thousands of people watched it and I am very happy that I was able to help – at least a bit – to shake the community.

December 12th – Rolling with Rails 2.0 – The First Full Tutorial – Part 1

• Following the success of the screencast, I made a tutorial explaining what I did in the video with more detail. This 2 part article was another great success. Both the screencast and the tutorial are the most viewed pages from my blog.

December 19th – The Rails Way

• Speaking of success, Obie Fernandez finally released what I personally call ‘The Rails Bible’. Seriously, it is the “The Rails Way”, with almost 900 pages it is ‘the’ definitive guide to Ruby on Rails. Highly recommended.

December 20th – RubyGems 1.0.0 Released

• RubyGems is the de facto way of deploying Ruby applications. And it finally reached maturity with 1.0.

December 26th – PragDave: Ruby 1.9—Right for You?

• As traditions demands, Matz was able to release Ruby 1.9! We were anxious about it. Dave Thomas is about to release the new “Programming Ruby” book (probably in a month or so). Now we have a lot of work to do, make sure all gems are tweaked, that every application actually runs, report the bugs back to the core team and pave the way for the final Ruby 2.0 stable release in a few months.

Conclusion

This was the year of maturity. 3 years ago, Rails was the new kid on the block. We had to prove ourselves. Everybody ranted, inquired, despised it. Even then, a very small group stood up against the majority. Those are the kind of people that usually help to shape the future.

People erroneously assume that ‘mass demand’ shape the future, but it is the other way around: one person or a small group make the leap and only after that the masses decide to follow or not. But you have to have those entrepreneurs and innovators that are willing to make the riskier bet, when no one else does. You have to have one Columbus for the whole America to exist.

3 years later. We don’t have to fight people so hard anymore. Rails now has a reputation of its own. We now have a solid community world-wide. There are still plenty of room to grow, but what we achieved is already incredible. Many products reached x.0 stable status, we now have a huge portfolio of delivered projects.

We are not the best. I don’t think that there is ‘the best’. Every technology have advantages and drawbacks. Between this wide range, we have to choose. It’s all about priorities. For example, if performance alone was the utmost priority, we would be writing assembler code to this day. But it isn’t. Manageability, productivity, there a lot of ‘-ities’ out there to consider. That’s why it is impossible to have only one choice that fits all.

For our needs, Rails fits perfectly. For other scenarios, it will not. And it doesn’t have to, that’s the gotcha. Whenever you try to be everything for everybody you will at least grow in complexity, and here one ‘-ity’ that you just miserably failed to support.

If I would offer you only one recommendation for 2008 that would be: “Make your own mind!” Don’t let yourself be totally influenced by others. Ruby on Rails is a great platform, I am making my living over it, but it doesn’t mean that I know the answer for ‘you’. ‘You’ have a completely different set of circumstances than I do. Make your choice! But make an educated choice.

Happy New Year!