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Culture, Marketing Tips on hiring any developer, not just Rails guys!
Recently Ruby Inside published a list of 11 tips on hiring a Rails developer. Since I’m slowly getting into Rails I thought, “Here’s going to be a list of awesome Rails-specific things I’d need to pick up on!”
Wrong.
Networking/Systems I get to gripe about Apple! (AKA AppleCare sucks)
I’ve been calling computer hardware support for many years. I’d venture a guess that I’ve called over 500 times, most of those to Dell, so I’m going to speak to my experience when calling them. I’ve been in charge of support for thousands of Dell machines, a wide spectrum from enterprise servers to desktops to notebooks. You’re probably chuckling to yourself “He’s called over 500 times? What kind of quality is that!”, but the truth is every manufacturer has defects. Since most PC manufactures get their parts from the same overseas (READ: dirt cheap) suppliers, they all have about the same failure rate. But I’ve always said that I recommend and buy Dell not for the quality, but for the warranty support. Dell has the best warranty support in the computer business. Apple doesn’t.
Productivity Communication between departments
I’m going to divert away from my recent trend of only blogging about Apple-y things. (Even though I broke down and bought an iPhone.)
One of the perennial problems we run across at Innova is communicating between our Elite Programming Unit and our Crack Network Team. Frequently, our hotshot programmers will start a project, but only tell the network team about it two days before it needs to go live. So, our Crack Sysadmin has two days to put together a vhost on a production server, enter in internal and external DNS entries, fiddle with the mod_rewrite stuff in the vhost until it works right, and all that. And Elite Programmer has two days (minus the time Sysadmin took to set things up) to verify that there aren’t any dumb bugs in the move to production.
(Yeah, we occasionally run into inconsistencies between our staging servers [ha] and our production boxes. We’re working on those, too.)
That sucks hard, so recently we set up a Project Whiteboard. So if Elite Programmer A starts a new project, FuzzyMuffins, then FuzzyMuffins gets it’s own space on the project board. The information we put up includes the name of the project, the project’s owner, the launch date (or a good estimate), and any dependencies. (For instance, some projects require complicated mod_rewrite crap. Another might require libxml to be compiled on production. Whatever.)
It’s a low-tech solution (this, coming from the company that uses a Wiki to coordinate lunch orders), but we’re confident that it works. We’re open to other suggestions, especially software that can do the heavy work for us — we’re programmers, we don’t like leaving our desks. Sunlight confuses us and human interaction is awkward.
I’ll let the General Interweb Population know how it goes.
Culture The Joy of Working for A Small Company
I talk to a lot of people about work, and especially about working for a small company. I’ve worked for huge companies (10,000+ employees world wide), and I’ve worked for small companies (5 employees).
Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. But I am surprised by how some people are willing to discount the advantages of working for a small company. Continue Reading…
Software Several Weeks of Leopard
I promised a better Leopard bit, and here I shall deliver.
My install problems were caused by FileVault encryption, I’m very sure. Not that anyone else is upgrading anymore, but if you find yourself upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, turn off FileVault before doing the upgrade, and do a clean install just to be safe.
Now that I’ve been running Leopard for a few weeks, I’ve found it to be a large improvement over Tiger. Here’s why:
- Spaces. There’s some bugs to work out but it’s more comfortable than any of the Tiger virtual desktop things I tried. (Although still not as awesome as pretty much any window manager for X.) Especially when I’m just on the laptop, having the nice virtual desktops to sort out windows is a win.
- Finder not sucking. Again, coming from Linux, Finder is a step back from Nautilus or Konqueror. It can’t natively read SFTP or TLS/SSL protected FTP volumes. I’m fairly certain we still can’t write to FTP sites, which is atrocious (I haven’t tested this yet, actually.) However, some of the showstopper bugs have been fixed: Finder no longer hangs for five minutes if suddenly a network connection drops and a mounted network volume is no longer available, and the whole “mountiing a network volume” process has been streamlined and improved to the point where CMD+K is no longer the fastest way to do it.
- Consistent user interface. Again, it’s not Linux, so I can’t just arbitrarily swap out my GTK theme (or KWin or whatever), but Leopard at least makes all of the default apps look the same. I no longer cringe when I open up a Finder window and find brushed metal staring back at me.
Actually, that’s it. Finder’s not such a bear w/ regard to network volumes, and Spaces, and things look cool. Totally worth it for me, but that’s subjective.
As usual, however, TextMate, QuickSilver, and iGTD combined make OS X the most pleasing to use dev environment I’ve come across.