Collaboraid recently had a visit with their client on that major intranet project for the still concealed client. Here they learned just how much of a difference it makes to work in a truly productive environment:

Yon, my colleague, would demo the work-in-progress to someone, and—as expected—we’d uncover some room for improvement here and there. But what turned out to be really fascinating was that most of the time, I was able to fix the problem on the spot, and we could re-test the improved version 10 minutes later.

Larger things, we’d do in out hotel rooms later that same night (after dinner and drinks with the client, of course). That’s what the power and productivity of Rails is like. In addition to just saving time, it also helps spur people’s imagination in constructive ways, when they see the kinds of changes that are possible on the fly like that.

Collaborative development and participatory design have long been the hallmarks of the Scandinavian school of software development. How wonderful to see it practiced using Rails.