Let’s face it, we all want the big bucks. And we all know Consultancy Law No. 1:

Your Rates Are Proportional To Your App’s Enterpriseyness

Or, as Shakespeare would have said:

Enterprisey Apps Invite, Nay Demand, Enterprisey Rates. Verily, Sunshine.

Rails make life easy for us but - and it’s a big but - we don’t want it to look easy. acts_as_enterprisey is your friend.

How does acts_as_enterprisey make webapp development look hard? Well, the only way your client can judge your app is by playing around with it. What better gives the feeling of heavy weights being lifted behind the scenes than slow response times? Exactly. That’s what acts_as_enterprisey does.

So while your client clicks, ...waits…, and then gets the page, you can blather on heroically about wrestling with clustered indexes, cache expiration strategies, n log n seek times, etc ad nauseam.

Usage

Simply insert acts_as_enterprisey in your ActiveRecord model. That’s it. (It wouldn’t be much use if you actually had to do some work to make it look hard, would it?)

For example:

1 class ShuttleLaunchSequencer < ActiveRecord::Base
2       acts_as_enterprisey
3     end

This slows down all the ShuttleLaunchSequencer’s finders by 2 seconds.

Another example:

1 class GpsSatelliteBeacon < ActiveRecord::Base
2       acts_as_enterprisey :delay => 3, :random => true
3     end

This slows down the GpsSatelliteBeacon’s finders by a random delay between 0 and 3 seconds.

You can feel your rates rising already. I know it.

Strategy

Clients pay you to solve their technical problems. They want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Especially after you start submitting enterprisey invoices.

So make their wishes come true: it’s only fair. Ethical, even. Crank the delay up as the deadline approaches, make them sweat, display fortitude and perseverance, etc. And when they can’t take it (the app’s sluggishness, your bills, whatever) any more, whip out the acts_as_enterprisey from your models and book the flights to Vegas.