Thanks for the reply James. Well reasoned. First, I haven’t used Engines yet, but quite probably will. I’ve hacked a “poor man’s” version of that functionality into some plugins I wrote for myself. But Engines is obviously a professional approach. So I’ll move that way in due time.

Back to theory. You write: “there aren’t many Rails developers who really need to work on more than a single application at the same time to any significant degree”. You’d know better than I. But still, I find that hard to believe. I seem to constantly stumble over Rails consulting shops in my web searches. But even if such people work on only one site at a time, every time they do a new one, there’s that huge overlap. What do they do about that overlap?

In the absence of finding a rational criticism of Engines – i.e. one that proposes an alternative solution to this uber-DRY problem – I fall back for a tentative answer I learned practicing corporate law years ago. In that world, lawyers bill by the hour. And the “optimal” lawyer is one who is somewhat inefficient, but not so inefficient as to attract the client’s attention. In other words, if you could solve your client’s problem in one day, that might make your client happy, but it’s a shitty business for you.

I hated that dynamic back then. I’d be shocked to find this is the dynamic keeping the Engines functionality – or something that does a similar thing – from seeing the light of day. But hey, humans are humans.

Whenever I read certain phrases, I seem to have reasonably consistent reactions to them. I’m cataloguing them here.

“The guys at” (i.e. “The guys at twitter”, “The 37signals guys”, etc) always highlights the surplus of males, particularly in software development. I’m not saying that it isn’t true, but for some reason I do wish that people would stop using this particular turn of phrase. On a related note, I find it particularly amusing when someone says “The engines guys”, given that I am the only developer really involved in that project. Anyway.

Tweets starting with “Hey, “, or “So, “, as if we were just hanging out, and they thought of something to say. Let me make it clear: I am not hanging out with you people on twitter.

Sentences that start with “my friend ", which basically means you are bragging about who you are friends with.

Any kind of earnestness or statement of intent or values - this is the internet, of course what you are writing is bullshit. Even if the person writing it is me! Huzzah.

Oh, “Pro tip”. Here, let me give you a ‘pro tip’: You can explain your tip in more detail if you don’t prefix it with some wanky phrase.

If you say “you’re doing it wrong”, then, well… you’re doing it wrong.

I don’t even want to get into “+1”-ing things.

Replace every usage of “hacking on” with “building some software using”, and it’s much more humane. Don’t pretend that we are ‘hackers’. We aren’t even ‘sneakers’. Most of us are building crappy CMS tools for boring businesses.

Tweeting about your blog posts. If I cared about your blog posts, I’d subscriber to your RSS/atom feed. Negative points if you link to a Hacker News post that only links back to your blog post.

Literally any reference to your ‘followers’ in a tweet, as if you have an audience, or a following, like you are some kind of fucking Jesus-type character.

Anything described as being “for the rest of us”. Whatever terrifying remainder you are pitching to, I am not a part of it. Don’t make me blow up the planet.

When someone tweets ‘ blah blah blah REDACTED’. It’s basically saying “I know something cool”. Oh, you tease, you. Whoop-de-fucking-do for you.

Asking people to tell you what you should write, which is basically saying: “I have no inspiration, but I know that you fools will lap up any old bullshit topic that I’ve chewed over and spit out into your faintly cheeping, pathetic gaping beak-holes”.