Women in Technology

Part of his (quick) response was essentially to say "just wait and see the latest revision".

Now that I've read the latest, I can see why. It creatively fixed most of the little issues that were holding back an already very good tutorial, with great results.

The story/conversation format is superb syntactic sugar for the combination of technical tutorial, management overview, and evangelism (not "hype", "hype" requires exaggeration) that an intro tutorial legitimately needs.

Kudos in particular for making the following trade-offs:

- linking to the platform-specific install instructions, giving assurances (justified, if my limited Win XPerience was typical) that this step requires minutes not hours.

- falling back to sql scripting for db setup
-- it's cross-platform
-- it's concise -- the db tech is not the focus of this piece
-- it's readable -- enough so that readers so inclined can translate it into the clicks and pecks of their favorite gui admin tool(s)

- finessing the security/password issues, but reminding the reader that they may exist (again, these issues are not the focus, and hopefully the reader knows best how to secure their own specific environment).

- taking the Mongrel "shortcut" and marking it well
-- one minor criticism on the sidebar:
CB: Not at all, CB. ...
[Oops. CB is addressing Paul, here.]
...Mongrel is a very lightweight, very Rails-friendly web server...
[OK so far.]
...There are several alternatives.
[I would have added something like "including options for most of the web servers you know". "Alternatives" are fine for pioneers, what most readers probably want to know, though, is that their "normal situation" is one of them.]
...We can get into that later if you want.
[Please do.]

My 2nd small criticism is that the article could have been a little more explicit about a forthcoming "Part 2". There are strong hints. Please say it is so!

Thanks for a great read. I look forward to the next.
Paul