Being an ADD programmer, I am always looking at the new and shiny to see if I can learn something. I may have mentioned Yariv Sadan's blog before. Yariv is a guy who has thrown himself into Erlang, creating all sorts of cool tools to let you build web-based apps in Erlang. I'll be honest: Erlang looks wicked cool, but good luck finding someone to host a web app for you. Maybe that might change. I'd hate to have to host my cutting edge up on my own co-located server. Especially when your budget for operations is close to zero.

He has a cool post on the problems some people had building a scalable Rails application. I've wondered how you would actually go about building a Rails app that can scale. There aren't too many examples out there, and looking at the blog posts that Yariv's blog talks about brings back fond memories of my adventures in helping to build an online dating site.

So why do I find this interesting? Well, it will go a long way towards helping me decide on the super-secret project. I *know* that PHP can scale if I need it to. I *know* where to find help on scaling PHP-driven web applications. I'm worried that I don't know enough about Rails to scale it if it becomes a big success. But perhaps I'm putting the horse before the cart here.

Either way, it's certainly food for thought. Of course, none of this will matter if I don't build the damn thing.