njonsson

Someone recently asked the following question in the discussion forum of the Rubyists LinkedIn group: What separates a junior Rails developer from a senior one?

My response follows. Join us at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=120725 to weigh in on this and other topics of interest to Rubyists. As of today there are almost 1,200 members, including numerous movers and shakers in the Ruby and Rails communities.

“Distinguishing between junior and senior people in the Rails world is not so different from making the distinction in other web development environments.

“Junior Rails people have not dealt with scaling issues to the degree that senior people have. Getting a public-facing Rails application to perform under significant stress is more challenging than doing the same with other building materials such as PHP. Senior people know how to performance-test Rails applications, where to look for bottlenecks, and how to eliminate them one after another until performance is acceptable in real conditions. The Ra