One of the things I’d love to see is a way to really backup what you’re talking about (and this mainly deals with server architecture, plugins, libraries, etc), that being performance tests. I’ve seen far too often that someone gives seemingly great advice, or talks down others’ advice, with absolutely zero stats. If it is an idea/practice/solution with testable, verifiable or falsifiable information, then it absolutely should be tested. Another requirement for performance related tests is that it would be great if it were able to be or forced to be verified by another person.

As I said in my comments on Obie’s blog, we *could* be standing on the shoulders of giants, just like the scientific community as a whole does. When someone proposes a new idea or theory, it is tested to hell and back, by numerous people. Only then is it accepted.

This wouldn’t work for say, fuzzy “this is how I manage my team”, but it would work for quite a bit of the ideas of how to structure your application, how to think about scaling, etc.

@biglove : Are you talking about simpler implementation of “Linkedin for rails developers” ? That should be cool but we would be repeating ourselves.

As for sharing best practices, lets begin with a wiki or some other collaborative platform with some passionate developers and see what happens.

@will : Absolutely. Best practices for scaling applications built in rails should be at the core of this model.

When you get to large applications, putting all the controllers and all the models into one directory just leads to confusion. Likewise, ActiveRecord is great at handling updates and modifications to single objects, but doesn’t say anything about how to manage operations that modify several objects at once. If you write your own custom file attachment library, do you put it in app, in lib, or in vendor/plugins? Where do you put administration facilities? How and where do you manage transaction logic: as a filter in the controller, as a block around the controller, or in a service layer?

Will.

Interestingly, I think the most valuable feedback a client can get is from other fellow developers. I have about 3-4 developers I’d recommend right now for projects because I’ve personally worked with them and I know for a fact they’re talented developers.

It would be interesting to implement something like what you’re talking about as well as have vetted developers in a guild of others, a pool that could critique and also condone one another, so clients will have an easier time not getting screwed and feel comfortable to ask for services (this is essentially what Carmelyne was suggesting).

So? Where should we start with this? How do you even begin something like this? Throw up a wiki and hope people don’t produce crap? haha