Today I unveiled the latest (and eventually best) version of The Rails Way at RailsConf 2013. Thanks to the cooperation of my publisher, this beta release is being distributed via the most excellent leanpub.com service. My co-authors are Kevin Faustino, Vitaly Kushner and Ari Lerner. ...
Call the shop up and get a decision maker on the phone. Convey that you know exactly why you're calling them and what you need. Request their top Rails (and/or testing) expert for 1 day. State right off the bat that you're willing to pay their full hourly rate for those 8 hours. If yo...
Woke up this morning to the following email request from the CTO of one of Hashrocket 's big, important clients: Can you give me a list of big name firms that you know are using Ruby on Rails for major projects. Need it by this afternoon for an important meeting with top management. I...
First of all, thank you for being so available and attentive. Both you and Obie have been absolutely wonderful in this process and I sincerely appreciate the time both of your have put into this. I'm excited to see where I can go now that I know what works. Before I get into the feedb...
Ch-ch-changes! I've joined Lean Startup Machine as their CTO and will be working remotely from Atlanta, with occasional trips to NYC. I've been advising LSM for a couple of years already, since becoming friends with their CEO, Trevor Owens, one of the best-connected entrepreneurs in N...
My friend Brennan Dunn and I have taken everything we know about bootstrapping successful consulting companies out of freelance work and packaged it into an actionable two-day online workshop. In addition to the course material, you will be privy to hours of conversations we've had wi...
I want a kill switch for all the electronic communications in the house. I'd like it to be a physical device, with a big red button, in my master bedroom. Kind of like how some people have a security console next to their beds, except mine would assist with mental safety. At midnight,...
This commit by Grant Hutchins & Peter Jaros back in July 2011 gives ActiveModels the ability to define their own partial paths by implementing a to_partial_path method. (You can find a great explanation of this killer new feature on José Valim's blog post about it . Just scroll down t...
My primary offering is honest and experienced advice. If you've followed me for awhile, then you know what my areas of expertise are: Growing a consulting operation from scratch Leadership of web development teams Adoption of Agile and Lean Startup techniques Ruby on Rails-related tec...
This is a guest post by Rusty Zarse CTO of Search Discovery, spurred by a series of email conversations that we had regarding the difficulty of finding experienced Rails talent. Rusty leads the Atlanta iOS Developers meetup and is one of the better known technologists in our city. Whe...
I see pairing work so well every day that I consider my career prior to my current job to have consisted mostly of wasting time. When I think back to all the code I’ve written for a job, I’m annoyed at how much less efficient I was then since I wasn’t pairing, and how much better my c...
Top 10 Mistakes Companies Make During Acquisitions (notes) Here are my notes from Don Keller's (@dkellerjr ) talk Top 10 Mistakes Companies Make During Acquisitions , presented today at RocketSpace in San Francisco. 1. Founder Equity Have your founders issued stock from day one so tha...
This behavior matches normal Ruby method inheritance: think of writing an attribute on a subclass as overriding the parent's reader method. Instances may overwrite the class value in the same way. (Note that the following code samples create anonymous classes to illustrate usage in a ...
This past weekend I had the pleasure of delivering a wide-ranging talk in Singapore about using Redis as a complement to your main relational database. It was essentially a much enhanced redo of my RailsConf 2012 talk of the same name. The challenge of covering this topic effectively ...
This is a guest post by Rusty Zarse CTO of Search Discovery, spurred by a series of email conversations that we had regarding the difficulty of finding experienced Rails talent. Rusty leads the Atlanta iOS Developers meetup and is one of the better known technologists in our city. Whe...
This is a guest post by Rusty Zarse CTO of Search Discovery, spurred by a series of email conversations that we had regarding the difficulty of finding experienced Rails talent. Rusty leads the Atlanta iOS Developers meetup and is one of the better known technologists in our city. Whe...
Since I got a sincere-sounding apology from Andrei, I have un-published my last blog post and hope this will be the end of the matter. Thanks to everyone that had my back about the way I handled it, and also those that gave me advice and support about it.
Just got this tasty love letter from one of my raving fans in Paris, France: From: Andrei Bodnarescu <[email protected]> To: obie Dear Sir, My name is Abo Moldova and I just wanted to tell you that you're one of the biggest fuck ups I've ever seen in my life. If I met you in real ...
I'm so dumb sometimes. I was just in the kitchen making myself a sandwich and it hit me why I have such a mental block about hiring anyone to do remote iOS development for me: I don't know anything about it! But how to get past that? I don't have time to teach myself, it would take to...
Maybe Super Tuesday got me in a mood to play with numbers tonight. I was poking around analytics stats for DueProps and noticed that my users are not fans of Internet Explorer in any significant numbers and among them, most use modern versions of IE (8,9) by a huge margin. These visit...
It's amazing how much we take for granted certain little tasks that we do so often they become muscle memory . The latest powerful example of that fact for me has been the annoyance provoked by the addition of a native Inspect Element option to the Firefox 10 context menu, exactly whe...
I often store Ruby code in the fields of ActiveRecord object, giving me the ability to morph the system's behavior at runtime. Metaprogramming in the large , if you will. This is one of my favorite techniques in the Ruby on Rails sphere and one of the reasons I love working with dynam...
