Obie Fernandez and Carlos Villela are ThoughtWorkers following the lead of other company programmers, like Aslak (who’s getting DamageControl on Rails) and John Wilkers, in exploring Rails further.

And while the first hit was free, the addiction is now setting in. Carlos writes:

…more often than not it’s hard to stop coding; more than once I’ve looked at the taskbar and gasped in disbelief – over the past month, I’ve coded way past 2 AM after having worked the whole day, and even though I needed to wake up early the next morning, I was not tired at all. So, to put it in another words, careful – this thing is addictive.

Obie takes a slightly more bullish approach and compares it with the woes of his day job in Java:

At work, as of this monday I started work on a project that would have most Java open-source fanatics salivating. Custom web app running on Java 5, Tomcat 5.5, Hibernate 3, Webwork… Cutting edge stuff, right? Right?

No way. Web development with Ruby leaves Java far, far behind.

…

Overall, the productivity loss is giving me withdrawal symptoms. I can’t wait to get back to my beloved Ruby this weekend.

ThoughtWorks is the company that employs Martin Fowler as their chief scientist. I asked him for an opinion on it all and got: “At the moment what I’m waiting for is to see if some us can use Rails on an actual project.” Very much looking forward to hear his and the rest of the firm’s evaluation once ThoughtWorks is able to land its first Ruby on Rails contract.

Maybe the client Obie Fernandez is working with would be a good prospect. In the comments to Obie’s withdrawal posting, Hank Roark writes:

I just happen to be the customer of the project Obie is working on. And I’m pretty happy with the team’s progress. I’m afraid that my expectations have been lowered by years and years of experience in the Java realm. Obie may convince me to use Ruby Rails, yet.

It’s great to see so many ThoughtWorkers getting into Rails. I had the good fortunes to hang with their JAOO 2003 delegation shortly after I had picked up Ruby, while Rails was still a mere twinkle in my eye, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Rock on.