A surprising number of entrepreneurs and developers are unfamiliar with the application of state machines to business logic workflows, so it's useful to see the topic presented in a succinct way. Good learning content tends to get upvoted on HN, especially when the discussion around the concept (for example, the discussion of State Machines and state machine libraries in this thread) is interesting as well.
you don't even have to be unfamiliar with state machines to have found some usefulness here. sometimes it's just nice to be reminded of a concept as you're wrangling the 20 different problems you face as an entrepreneur on any given day.
the blog post wasn't particularly deep, but the (short) discussion here was worth perusing, as i'm considering employing a state machine for my rails app and have been generally looking for options and best practices (in a mental background thread). but it looks like most (all?) existing gems assume a fixed set of states and transitions, and i was hoping to find something designed primarily for user-defined states and transitions.
