My short reaction: Good lord, you know all that and still feel like the article is targeted at you? Or at Rails as a technology?
Long reaction: You missed the point of the article, which is that keeping on top of the latest and greatest technologies is almost never necessary, and it is never sufficient under any circumstances. You don't have to know what a mongrel is. You do have to understand the orders-of-magnitude difference between different levels in the memory heirarchy. (RAM is much better than disk -- a simple, stupid fact that people ignore all the time.) There are lots of people running around with credentials and hot technologies who don't know what they're doing, and there are lots of young people who worship those guys and spend their time running after trendy stuff because they haven't yet figured out the difference between learning technology and deciding what to wear. (Which might not be as bad as relying on engineering principles to choose your wardrobe. Hmmm, personal food for thought.)
Sure his article isn't particularly original in intent or execution, but the need for this article is perennial. You have to keep updating it because it's aimed at people who only pay attention if you talk about the current latest and greatest. That's why Rails was the perfect victim -- that's where his target audience is right now. (And the Microsoft stack is the perfect frumpy foil to Rails.) Not that the Rails community doesn't contain other kind of people; it evidently does, or posts like yours wouldn't exist. But it is also The Trendy Thing and is therefore cursed with attracting the naive my-favorite-band-is-better-than-yours types who think "follow the buzz" is the successful strategy for all domains of life.
Fast-forward ten years, and I'm sure he'll have written the same article with the blanks filled in with another hot technology. Which is a good thing.
Long reaction: You missed the point of the article, which is that keeping on top of the latest and greatest technologies is almost never necessary, and it is never sufficient under any circumstances. You don't have to know what a mongrel is. You do have to understand the orders-of-magnitude difference between different levels in the memory heirarchy. (RAM is much better than disk -- a simple, stupid fact that people ignore all the time.) There are lots of people running around with credentials and hot technologies who don't know what they're doing, and there are lots of young people who worship those guys and spend their time running after trendy stuff because they haven't yet figured out the difference between learning technology and deciding what to wear. (Which might not be as bad as relying on engineering principles to choose your wardrobe. Hmmm, personal food for thought.)
Sure his article isn't particularly original in intent or execution, but the need for this article is perennial. You have to keep updating it because it's aimed at people who only pay attention if you talk about the current latest and greatest. That's why Rails was the perfect victim -- that's where his target audience is right now. (And the Microsoft stack is the perfect frumpy foil to Rails.) Not that the Rails community doesn't contain other kind of people; it evidently does, or posts like yours wouldn't exist. But it is also The Trendy Thing and is therefore cursed with attracting the naive my-favorite-band-is-better-than-yours types who think "follow the buzz" is the successful strategy for all domains of life.
Fast-forward ten years, and I'm sure he'll have written the same article with the blanks filled in with another hot technology. Which is a good thing.