A big topic at railsconf this year was hosting , deployment and scaling of apps. Talks and sessions on these topics were everywhere, not to mention Engine Yard getting pimped left and right (No, I won’t wear your tshirt). I found it extremely ironic then, when Michael Koziarski said in the closing keynote (paraphrased):

Deployment is a word you shouldn’t have to know.

I couldn’t agree more. I want to be as removed from the details of how to deploy and scale an application as possible. I want to focus on writing software that meets my customer’s needs, and the rest is details.

I think mod_rails is a big step in that direction. I think those guys are awesome, but I’m certainly not interested in writing improvements to garbage collectors to make ruby faster. It’s just not my bag. The more time I have to spend worrying about and managing deployment, the less time I’m spending “investing in myself” as DHH put it, and solving problems for my customers. It’s good to know that there are smart people out there working on how to scale applications, but I just don’t want to have to concern myself with it. Most of the apps I write are pretty small anyway, and when I meet the need to seriously scale, I’ll pay someone else to do it. Software like mod_rails is allowing me to survive even longer on a VPS (we use slicehost) so I can spend my time doing what I do best.