One of the best things about watching the Rails community grow is noticing similarities in other communities. For people unfamiliar with "the Rails way", it is about being simple, agile, opinionated, and passionate. Rebellious against bloated frameworks, the Rails core team holds strong opinions about how software should be.
A few months ago Jon Skeet, a prominent C# developer in the .NET community, wrote a
blog entry about resumes. I am not going to quote his entire post here, but how he works with .NET reminds me a lot of how developers work with Rails. He likes easy-to-read code, refactoring, solving actual problems, using a whiteboard over Visio, and being passionate. These are some of the same concepts evangelized by the Rails community.
My second example of "community crossover" goes outside the realm of development. When I was on vacation last month I read Freakonomics, written by "a rogue economist." Somehow, an economist analyzing sumo wrestling and gangs seems analogous to how Rails is culture-changing. Steven Levitt is opinionated too - he shares research which indicates abortion lowers crime and parenting typically makes little difference.
Seeing how the people who are causing (or evangelizing) change share similar characteristics is interesting. Maybe instead of calling it "the Rails way," I should have called it "the universal being different for the better" way.