Lone Star Ruby Conf 2008: How not to Build a Service

FiveRuns launched the RM-Manage monitoring service targeting the Ruby on Rails market in 2007, but not without making plenty of mistakes in the process. This talk will discuss the social, technical and business lessons learned over the last year. In building the RM-Manage service, we experienced problems of all types:

• Not invented here: building unnecessary technology instead of using standard technology
• The customer as a trained poodle: making the customer jump through hoops just to use the service
• Inappropriate technology: using the wrong tool for the job
• Know your target market: enterprise systems management + $40/month customer = disaster
• Failure to leverage Ruby’s strengths: not a single yield in the entire code base!

We’ve spent the last 6 months fixing these issues. This talk will examine these problems and what we did to fix them.