It’s fashionable, or perhaps inevitable, for tech communities to trash their competition. The Emacs folks like to mock vi users; Windows folk look down on us Mac users (and Linux users mock us both); and everyone likes to mock PHP despite PHP’s dominance in the web world. We geeks make arguing over minor technical points into a kind of art.

This is all pretty understandable: it’s easy to define community in terms of what we’re not. A common enemy focuses and drives us. Competition can take a positive form: when it’s friendly and constructive both communities benefit.

Yes, the Snakes and Rubies videos are now online.

No, they’re not perfect.

No, I’m not going to wait for FCP to re-render any more.

I’ll write a post-mortem after I’ve gotten some sleep; now go watch Adrian kick major ass.

One of the questions asked at Snakes & Rubies was about what Django could learn from Rails (and vice versa). Once I finish wrestling Final Cut Pro to the ground you’ll be able to see how Adrian and David answered the question, but in the meantime it got me thinking about some cool features of Rails that are worth ripping off… er… being inspired by:

• find_or_create convenience methods. Pretty simple, so expect to see a similar method in Django pretty soon.

Sam Newman just posted a comparison of Django and Rails which is extremely balanced and fair, and a very good read. I’ve obviously got a few bits of feedback, so here goes: