Paul Graham doesn’t understand the appeal of New York City to web nerds. He says “Cambridge… feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York’s is finance and Silicon Valley’s is startups.” Not so! New York, for me, is media. And I’m not alone.

I’ll take this point to introduce myself to this blog, Oddly Zen, as this is my first post, and my story informs my defense of New York against Cambridge and Silicon Valley. I do live in New York, and I work in media. I work for Observer Media Group as the technical team leader (head nerd), where I run Observer.com and Politicker.com.

I’m certainly not in New York for the money, and I’m not that envious of those who have more than me. I’m in New York because of the pace and excitement of my niche in software development. The problems in computing for news media are enormous for many reasons; managing web content in a clean and useful way is so much harder than most developers know (if you scoff at that claim, I’ll trade jobs with you for a day).

Anyhow, the bulk of the CMS-needing media companies of the world are in New York, and many of them employ nerds like me to whip their CMS into shape. And as media becomes more interactive and more (gasp) social, startups bubble up around the fringe. There are many such startups in New York City; in fact this is probably true for other industries, like advertising, textiles, and public relations. I just don’t know anything about these domains. The result is that there are a ton of software developers here. And most of us aren’t working in finance. More ⊕

I visited one of my favorite sites today — A List Apart. I was excited to see an article entitled “Getting Started with Ruby on Rails.” Like the name suggests, it is a solid introduction to Ruby on Rails and programming with the framework. Through Rails has already won many converts, it is still just being picked up by scads of developers… those who thought it best to wait until it was more supported or more mature.

I began experimenting with Rails fairly early due to a coworker’s suggestion. Then I dove in head-first when I started working for a firm specializing in Ruby on Rails development. And I’ve loved every minute of this wild ride. It is more fulfilling than previous frameworks I’ve used — ASP.NET, in particular. This feeling is due in heavy measure to the eloquence of Ruby the language, it’s natural feel, but also to the design considerations of the Rails framework. It is true that constraint can spawn creativity… ask anyone who has written a Sonnet and followed the appropriate conventions including Iambic Pentameter and the rhyme scheme. In this way, Rails allows me greater creativity and flexibility through its constraints. More ⊕