Shanti’s Dispatches

Over a year ago I wrote an article for ThinkVitamin.com entitled “5 Ways to Optimize Your AJAX in Ruby on Rails.”

It was about 95% complete; it just needed some final editing, etc. Lisa Price from Vitamin.com (bless her heart) kept emailing me every few months to see if it was finally ready.

Now we’ve all read the stories from the sales & marketing literature about how it takes on average at least 7 contacts before a prospect will finally bite. That statistic sounds about right here!

Around Christmas I told her to buzz off! (in as nice a way possible) because I didn’t know if I’d ever have time / etc. to put on the finishing touches.

Today Adam Howell (from Vitamin.com) emailed me reminding me about the unpublished piece and included this note “I talked to Lisa about it and she said DHH himself signed off on the post.” Now that’s not exactly true but the David did look it over and give his constructive feedback.

I was finally in the right place tonight to finish it up and give them the OK to proceed with publishing it.

Moral of the Story: It Might Never be 100% Perfect

Part of the mental block on my part was knowing that there were techniques in the article which I would not 100% recommend anymore.

As a developer, one of the signs that you are getting better is that you look back on previous code and think, “wow, what was I thinking here?” because you are now aware of better, cleaner & more elegant ways of achieving the same result. That was the case with some of the optimization techniques in the article.

However I should say I do believe you can learn something from all of the techniques in the article, even if there are better ways to achieve the same or similar results.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos