Harley Mackenzie
Harley Mackenzie
Harley has worked in the risk management, aviation software and the energy industries, with a background in engineering and mathematics, and has been the owner and managing director of HARD software for the last 10 years. HARD software is an independent consulting and software development company that specializes in the systems analysis, design and implementation of technical software. Harley has developed many trading and risk management applications in the energy and finance industries mainly using open source languages such as perl and ruby and is a member of OSIA.
How to get Rails web applications accepted in industry
Ruby and Rails has been proven as an excellent high productivity framework for the development of web applications, but has had relatively minor impact on the software development practices of major in-house commercial software development, where a Microsoft only culture usually dominates. HARD software has recently developed successful risk management and trading software using Rails as the web application platform for many clients in the energy and finance sectors whose previous IT policies dictated Windows languages on Windows platforms.
This talk seeks to demonstrate the real economic advantages of Rails as a commercial web application platform in comparison to common Microsoft only IT policies and practices, how to interact with legacy infra-structures, how to deal with open source hostile IT departments and share the experiences of making Rails work for industry. Finally the presentation will explore the potential for Rails in industry and how there are significant opportunities to use this platform to considerable competitive advantage.
Published Oct 24, 2009.
I've heard a lot of good comment of Harley's company's work.