Locomotivation

When I first joined Squeejee, I listed the primary reasons for my quitting a stable job and jumping on the Rails train with Wynn, Jim and Chris. One reason I listed was flexibility. I took this to the extreme last month when I came to Beijing to start my personal experiment in “offshoring”. I’m very lucky to be working with a small, smart, tight-knit group at Squeejee that we can pull this off without a hitch.

Beijing on Rails

There’s an incredible amount of curiosity in Beijing towards Rails, but there’s also no doubt that the software world, at the moment, still revolves around the US. Rails books and Chinese translated Rails articles are always a few weeks or months behind. In Rails time, that’s an eternity. Therefore, even though the Beijing Rails community is slowly growing, the expertise and knowledge is still lagging behind. That’s also why currently there is very little community participation out of China. It’s not due to lack of desire, it’s just that Rails expertise is spreading too slowly.

English seems to be the major bottleneck at the moment, but another attribute preventing faster Rails adoption is the Chinese developers’ current mindset of being dependent on big vendors. In fact, being anti-enterprise was a feature that drew many hackers in the States to Rails. But in a society where dependence on some larger structure is inherent, this is viewed as an unnecessary risk.

That being said, the Rails community, while not flourishing, still continues to gardner interest and growth. Jesse Cai, founder of chinaonrails.com, is one of many budding Rails leaders in Beijing. In fact, we hope to work with Jesse and chinaonrails to bring many more Rails events to Beijing in the near future.

Startups in Beijing

Beijing is home to Tsinghua University and Beijing University – the Chinese versions of MIT and Harvard. Google, IBM, Yahoo, Microsoft, HP, Accenture, Thoughtworks, InfoQ, ZDNet and countless other software firms also have offices here. As you can imagine, the developer circles are quite active with energetic hackers and free flowing ideas. Just being here for a month, I’ve attended an InfoQ talk on Yahoo’s application platform and a Thoughtworks sponsored Open Party (where I gave a talk on how to make money working with US clients).

I’ve been to many Barcamps and conferences in the States, and I can say the energy and passion are just as high in Beijing as it is in San Francisco or Austin. Everyone knows all the US startups: facebook, linkedin, etc. The desire is there, the English is improving and it’s obvious to me that it’s only a matter of time before we see more and more Chinese startups crossing the pond.

Working remotely

When I first got to Beijing, I really didn’t know what to expect. Being Chinese American, I had visited China many times with family, but we always stayed in hotels and I really didn’t have a good idea of what living in China would be like. Would I have internet? Would the Great Firewall block Gmail? Would Skype work? How will I find an apartment? Could I ssh into our servers?

Turns out, China is indeed the People’s Republic of Capitalism. Every other cafe has free wifi (as does Starbucks), and ADSL internet is pretty standard in Beijing. Skype works perfectly and getting a cell phone is dead simple too (no contracts, just buy minutes on a GSM card and stick it in any GSM phone). My only worry was that I wasn’t going to be able to access Campfire, which our team depends heavily on. But that also works perfectly. It’s virtually the same as working from home in any US city. I even got Texas style BBQ!

The only annoying thing I’ve encountered is sporadic links don’t work. For example, all DZone and Feedburner redirects are blocked, as are random Wordpress blogs. Also, if you’re a Dr Pepper fan like I am, you’re out of luck.

Conclusion

In the interest of keeping this short, I very briefly touched on several big topics. As I learn more about Beijing’s Rails and startup community, I hope to chronicle it on this blog. To keep things interesting, I am also planning a series of interviews with various Rails and startup folks in Beijing. If you have any requests or questions, send them my way!

Next up on the interview: Jesse Cai, founder of chinaonrails.com. Stay tuned…