We determined that whatever language or language combo we transitioned to, it had to meet certain criteria and match the culture of our organization. We’re an entrepreneurial company of 300+ team members focusing on 15+ different business units. We get a lot done with a little and strive to maintain the balance between perfection and production—we call this excellence. Our development team of 50+ individuals comprises a unique mix of entrepreneurs who happen to work as technologists. We’re partners with the business units. We win when they win.
We eventually organized these criteria into groups of three and dubbed our journey the Triple Trifecta.
Single Trifecta:
- Performance
- Scalability
- Speed to Market
Double Trifecta:
- Innovation
- Community
- Team Growth
Triple Trifecta:
- Love the Company (we already do)
- Love the Projects (yup, this one too)
- Love the Code (we didn’t as much … until now)
To make it official, and to give the vetting process a personality, we codenamed the project to select a new language(s) “Jawbreaker.”
To create a rally cry and provide focus, we then set the vision: Our goal is to select innovative programming languages that bolster company and team growth.
With our vision and criteria in hand, we set off on our journey.
Narrowing It Down
During the first phase of the vetting process, we narrowed the prospects down to Grails, CakePHP and Ruby on Rails. We then did some deep dives on each technology to better understand their pros and cons. We looked at how many open-source projects were active for each language. We evaluated how each was driving innovation. We considered the amount of community involvement and active contribution to that community.
Another key element was including well-versed proponents of each language on our team as part of the process. They each presented their views on their respective language preference. Each proponent outlined the pros and cons of each language to our development leadership team.
We then formed teams, built apps in each language/framework, and compared the results. Each team presented their findings to our entire development team.
From there we narrowed it down to Java and Ruby on Rails. We couldn’t just pick one, so we went with both, for different uses and reasons.
Find out what why we decided on Ruby on Rails in, Running Into Rails: Why Rails + Java? (Part 3).