Needed: Ruby/Rails Developers in Israel

I just read Ido's great post, and couldn't stop myself from writing a response post.

Basically, what we have in Israel is a chicken-and-an-egg problem. Why? because there will be no Rails programmers if the market (=big # of companies) would require it, and no company would shift to Rails development if there would be no developers to make it do that.

The problem starts in the way developers are "born" in Israel. They are either:

1. become developers during their service in the IDF - no Rails there.
2. become developers after a relevant academic degree - AFAIK, no Rails there either.
3. become developers in different ways, most of those would try and learn technologies which are required by the market. The remaining few that would bother learning Rails (or Django) are probably those who also read this blog.

I think that in the US market, especially in the Silicon Valley, this is not the case. Developers there are educated differently and are much more likely to be exposed to Rails. The only Rails developer I know - learned it while working in the Valley.

Here's another one for you: how many Israeli web-hosting companies do you know that supports Rails? How many for PHP/Java/.NET?

So, even if I'd try and develop a Rails application for the local market, I'd have to host it abroad, which is a shame.

A while back I did a short survey regarding the buzz around Rails development and other web frameworks. Check out the replies. How many chose Rails?

Finally, I must admit that I'm no better. I had a chance to choose Rails recently, but didn't. Sorry, I couldn't find others whom I could hire if needed.

.NET MembershipProvider with MySQL

If you're a .NET developer (Mono or MS, doesn't matter) and an OSS enthusiast, then you're probably using the MembershipProvider provided by MySQL instead of the default MS provider for MS-SQL. The MySQL MembershipProvider comes bundled within the MySQL Connector for .NET.


In certain configurations, one can expect various bugs related to the MySQL Connector, especially with the latest version of MySQL Server and/or Windows and/or IIS. The most annoying thing about such bugs is that they don't introduce themselves on a development machine (different web-server, different OS, etc.).

My latest bug involved getting NULL for Membership.GetUser calls, even for logged in users. The bug  would occur inconsistently, which made stuff quite hard to debug.
The solution? simple - always use the latest version of the MySQL Connector.

This is why I always plan the first-time production deployment to take a few days. You can never tell what will go wrong.