Interview With Jesse Cai

I mentioned in my original article on working in beijing that I would be chronicling a series of interviews with prominent Rails developers in China. The first person I was able to catch up with is Jesse Cai, founder of chinaonrails.com.

Tell us a little about your background (personal and technical)

I’m Jesse Cai, my chinese name is 蔡望勤 (Cai Wang Qin). I started programming in 1997 with Pascal, then Trouble C 2.0, and then 8086 assembly. I lived in southern China from 2001 to 2005, where I worked as a technical consultant for Cyberway, P&G. and made HRMS (human resources management systems) for Flextronics, AutoTec, and EuroTec. My previous experience includes ASP/PHP for 1 year, .NET for 1.5 years and Java for 2.5 years.

I started blogging in July, 2005 and joined UUZone Inc. at the end of 2005, which was the biggest social networking site in China at the time.

Now i’m based in Beijing working for P1.cn, a fashion oriented social network focused on the emerging Chinese market. Of course, we’re using Rails.

How did you first happen onto Rails?

When i started working for UUZone at the end of 2005, many web2.0-type sites were emerging and many of them had cool mashup applications. We saw this as an opportunity to join the trend and give give our members the latest and greatest user experience. At the time, we were using Java, and thought that if we built our new mashup application in Java, it would take too long to release. So we thought about using another language or framework optimized for web/mashup development.

Since we were Java oriented, we first found Groovy. It’s a Java-based scripting language, and we can use our existing packages and code, so that seemed pretty cool. But Groovy at that time was 1.0 beta, and there were almost no production applications using Groovy. We used Groovy to prototype an internal version of Delicious for UUZone members, and we finished it in 1 week, so that’s how we got turned on to the rapid prototyping of scripting languages. We then wanted to use Groovy for larger applications, but it wasn’t ready for production. I even exchanged several emails with the Groovy PM and received very fast response. But we never stopped looking for better, simpler way for web development, which lead me to Grails 0.3. Nobody was using it at the time, but that was how I came across Ruby on Rails 0.6, from the Grails site. I watched the video and tried Rails and found it simple and fast enough. Many people said it has performance problem, so I did many performance tests myself and found the results adequate. So I implemented my first Rails app: a UUZone members/photos and Google Map Mashup. After we debuted our app to our members, it received very positive feedback and the project was a very big success. I loved programming like this, so I stuck with Rails ever since.

Being the creator of Chinaonrails.com, you have a good pulse on the Rails community in China. What are your general thoughts on Ruby/Rails in China?

I created ChinaonRails.com at the beginning of 2006. There were only two books for Ruby on Rals, one was Programming Ruby, another one was Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails. There were no Chinese books at all, and no Chinese community for Rails. As you know, the best part of Rails is its community!

For Ruby, I think many (Chinese) people have prejudice against it. I don’t know if it’s because it came from Japan or what. Maybe the Chinese education is too focused on Microsoft technologies since they teach Windows in school. Not a lot of people know linux or open source very well. For Rails, there are two kinds of people who use it: one is a senior programmer, they were expert in Java or other language, and the other is a newbie. In China, there are two kinds of companies using Rails: one is outsource consultancy and the other is startups. I haven’t seen many traditional commercial companies using Rails in China, and so it’s a little bit hard to find good Rails developers. I gave a talk at Beijing Institute and Technology University for Rails. The students ddin’t seem very interested, i don’t know why.

Fortunately, the Rails community in China is still growing and more and more good people are starting to be more curious about it.

Why hasn’t Rails taken off in China as much as the US or Europe?

As i said, not so many people know it. I think another big reason is there was no organization to push Rails in China. Is US and Europe, there are many RailsConfs, barcamps, but not in China. And the final reason is how do people make money using Rails in China?

What blogs or podcasts are you a fan of?

Many, I have more than 100 ruby on rails feeds in Google Reader. I especially like peepcode podcasts and Railscasts. I’m learning so many things through blogs and podcasts.

Who would you like to buy a beer for in the Chinese Ruby/Rails community?

bd7lx, he is a hero in the Ruby/Rails community in China. He always brings Ruby/Rails news to the Chinese community, and answers questions frequently.

Who would you like to buy a beer for outside of China?

Hmm, the first guy of course is DHH, but probably many people buy beers for him, so I will take someone else :). There’s Jason from http://railsenvy.com, Ilya Grigorik from http://igvita.com, Josh Susser from http://blog.hasmanythrough.com, anyone from http://www.engineyard.com, I may need help from them soon, and you – you help bridge the Rails communities in China and English speaking world.