I've found your stuff tremendously useful. Potholes aren't quite the metaphor for what your'e talking about. Potholes may mess up your suspension if you hit enough of them, or be a little uncomfortable. No, I'd use roadblocks as the metaphor here, or improvised explosive devices, because if you don't know about issues like the one you talked about with Factory Giral are there, they will waste your entire day.
My path to learning ruby and later rails started off by working through the Mike Hartl rails tutorial and doing the codeschool courses. but then what? I had no where to go after that. Everyone told me to build my own app but there were still many questions that I needed answered. This is where the RailsApps really stepped in and helped me out. It was a great place to go for code inspiration and pointed me toward a solution to problems I had run into. It also gave me a gateway into open source work by contributing tests to a few of the projects. So kudos to Daniel for picking up the newbies that have worked through a few tutorials and books and guiding them through the transition into junior developers.
I could be wrong, but I think you're going to have a hard time convincing rails newcomers to fork over the cash in a recurring model and as the post indicates, the experienced developers are familiar with the territory.
I'm sure there's money to be made keeping people up to date on these frustrating changes, but I don't know if this is how to do that most effectively.
Wouldn't these sorts of issues be solved more easily if the Gemfile listed specific versions of the gem dependencies? I don't like the idea of allowing a Rails app to just download whatever is the most recent version of a gem for this exact reason.
You can specify gem versions in a Gemfile. It's a good idea when you lock down an app and don't plan to update it regularly. This blog post is concerned with the larger issue of starting new projects and finding that certain integrations require specific tweaks that are often not well known and may be temporary. Rails and its gem ecosystem evolves constantly.