Obie Fernandez

A Farewell Shot of Jack for Durran

Durran Jordan leaves for Berlin from Hashrocket on Vimeo.

Join Hashrocket for a shot of Jack as we bid farewell to one of our oldest employees, notorious as the creator of the Mongoid mapping library for MongoDB. Losing Durran is particularly bittersweet for me, since he was my protege earlier in the decade and has been one of my best friends ever since. He's one of the hardest working (and hardest drinking) people I know. It's going to suck seeing him less often from now on.

This Is Not The Greatest Song In The World

...It's Just a Tribute

Change is one of the only constants in life. Today marks a big change in our life at Hashrocket as we say goodbye to one of the original Rocketeers, Jon "Lark" Larkowski. He's taking a break from consulting and moving on to greener pastures on the west coast. Don't recruit him all at once now. Seriously.

Once it was established that Lark was actually leaving Hashrocket, I knew I had to put together a tribute blog post. After a ridiculous amount of clicking on the Older link in Gmail's search results, I was able to dig up Jon's first conversation with me. It was his emailed application to work with me on the Citycliq project back on August 29, 2007:

I want this job.  You would have to train and mentor me on the deeper Rails parts.  The web design and CSS, I know.  As for personality, I have a feeling I'd be a great fit.  Let's find out.

I left my .NET job two months ago, because I discovered joy in Rails.  Learning Rails this last year has made me feel like a kid again.  I realized I want to be a dynamic player in a vital, thought-leading, intelligent scene, for a change.  Saw you at RailsConf/RejectConf, though we didn't meet.  A chance to work/learn/play with someone of your reputation in the community would be exciting.

I can start Monday, unless you take Labor Day off.  In which case, I love the beach!

Read on for my resume.  Call if you're interested.

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Jon

I've since used Lark's email as an example of how to apply to a job with boldness. He flattered me without coming off as (too much of) a fanboy. The "I can start Monday, unless you take Labor Day off" line was priceless. I remember exclaiming "Who is this guy?"

Who indeed! It wasn't too long before Jon and I were off on adventures together, including coming up with the Hashrocket name and logo, as well as being part of the original small team that got the company off the ground.

As some of you might know, "Hashrocket" was one of the proposed names for our electronic+metal band project. Our only production was a rough cover of the Michael Jackson classic, Dirty Diana, with vocals by a girl named, you guessed it, Diana. No you can't get a copy of it.

Our first serious business trip together was kicking off a deal in NYC with Thomson Reuters. As we hustled over from our hotel to the Reuters building in Times Square, just a few short blocks away, I decided we should buy some authentic New York bagels for breakfast. Thing was, we didn’t quite have time (nor space in the cramped bagel shop) to actually eat the bagels and enjoy our coffees before 9 am, the scheduled time we were to meet the client. Instead of waiting to eat later, or skipping a meal, we took our bagels to go, in little brown paper bags, and continued on our way.

At the lobby of the Reuters building, we were held up by the fact that the client was delayed and unavailable to let us up to the appointed floor. So we stood there, hungrily, debating the timing of our breakfast. One the one hand, a warm bagel is much better tasting than a cold bagel. On the other, it would be easier to sit down for breakfast once we made it upstairs to an office, rather than chowing down in the Reuters building lobby. I told Jon, “You know, we could just wait until we got upstairs and then we could eat our bagels as we meet the new clients.”

“That... would be quite a power play,” responded Jon, with his signature wit, adding “there’s nothing like eating during personal introductions to really establish who’s in charge.”

And that's exactly what we did. Reuters remains one of the largest accounts we've ever had in the history of the company.

One of Lark's favorite contributions to Hashrocket was our bookclub, which he produced and hosted on a regular basis after I threw a fit about none of the Rocketeers having read The Rails Way yet. The phrase "it's not about book club" has become our shorthand catchphrase when there's any sort of organizational interpersonal strife or miscommunication. It started when Lark frustratedly called everyone out at an all-hands company meeting for not participating in book club. It was a cliche case of good intentions gone wrong. Lark was trying to promote continuous learning, social gathering, and intellectual discussion. But due to frustration it came out all wrong, and it ended with Lark stammering, "It's not about book club!" So, this was the archetypal event that we now allude to with the phrase. It also sometimes a playful euphemism for, "Fuck you, Lark."

I asked most of the old-time Rocketeers to share their favorite memories of working with Lark. Desi and Sandro were quick to reply, so their comments are below. Corey, in typical fashion, sent pictures of himself sans comments. Dammit, Corey! (The rest of you can chip in via the comments if you want.)

"Fear is the mind killer"

...Lark said this to me all the time in the early days and it drove me nuts, but now it makes me want to cry because I am gonna miss him. One thing that is super memorable about Jon it's his laugh. I can hear it in my head I know it so well. I'll definitely miss the laugh. - Desi

 

Lark was the mother of Hashrocket. Lark made it his purpose to continually ask how each of our decisions affected our company ethos. His largest concern was that we'd turn into just another development shop so he organized extracurriculars to ensure we took advantage of all the great minds at Hashrocket. - Sandro

The Self-Destruct File

One of my most important possessions was stolen last night when the Hashrocket office was burglarized: my 17" MacBook Pro, which has had a permanent home on my desk since I got a MacBook Air about a year ago. The thieves also got some of our iMac workstations and a couple of 30" monitors. Today has not been a happy afternoon for me.

The incident (and the subsequent trouble I'm going through pulling SSH keys and changing passwords on everything) has me thinking that perhaps there should be a sort of "self-destruct" file on the desktop. It would have to be named in a honeypot fashion that would seem irresistible to thieves and anyone nosing around your system without your permission. So maybe it would be named "account_numbers.txt" or something like that. When they double clicked it, a series of events would happen. First the computer should turn on the camera and snap a photograph and send it along with IP address and any other information that could be gleaned from the local network. (If the computer was offline, maybe it would wait until it got connectivity?)

Finally, if not disabled within a few seconds in some way that the thief would not be aware of, the computer would delete everything sensitive as well as disabling itself for future use - "bricking itself."

I can't be the first to have had these kinds of thoughts. It sucks big time to get your stuff stolen.

The sad part of this whole affair is that we've normally been very happy-go-lucky and easygoing about guests and even strangers visiting the office. Not to mention all the photos and videos online of us in our offices showing tons of nice equipment. The list of potential suspects is huge and we know we were targeted in particular. This world seems perfectly designed to kill idealism and make you cynical as you grow older.

Hashrocket Named One of Top Employers in North Florida

I'll update this post with a link to the JBJ site article once it's available publicly in about 30 days.

Some additional information not included in the article:

• We actually have about 25 employees based in Jacksonville. If you count everyone involved on a day-to-day basis including contractors at all locations the number is over 40.
• We offer full match on 401k contributions up to IRS limits, with no vesting period
• We reimburse monthly gym membership dues
• We pick up the tab for our weekly happy hour on Wednesdays
• High-end Apple workstations for everyone

Most importantly, but difficult to state concisely: We have fun on a daily basis because we work on cool projects with awesome clients. Most of our clients are startups and 100% success-focused. They encourage us to work the way we know will bring them the most success, which is why we're able to push the envelope on continuous process improvement. Progressive testing/spec'ing practices, pair programming, agile design, all these are possible because I actively avoid trying to work with clients that have legacy issues, corporate politics, non-cooperative stakeholders, saboteurs, etc.

We should have a real job listings page on our site soon. For the moment, if you're a great web designer or developer and feel like you would fit in at Hashrocket, contact jobs@hashrocket.com - We're hiring!

What does Quality mean to you?

 

The tag map above is an artifact of a discussion about quality that we had internally at Hashrocket last Friday. The question was: "How do we measure Quality on our projects?"

Many of us felt that money (budget) or rather, adherence to the client's budget was the best way to judge quality. I took that to indicate awareness and constant refinement of the quality/speed ratio.

Interestingly, lifestyle (pace) ranked highly, which I think is a reflection of our core values. A comfortable, stress-free environment and sustainable pace is an essential factor in production of quality software. However, I don't know if you can use lifestyle indicators as a quality measurement.

Customer satisfaction ranked highly as well, but perhaps not as high as the others because customers are not always clued in to the real level of quality in their application? Hopefully some of my rocketeers will chime in with their opinions about that.

The answer with the most votes by far was craftmanship, which itself needs further discussion to define well and understand. As a group, we brainstormed ways to measure craftsmanship and ended up with the following ideas, not weighted:

 

How do you define quality and craftsmanship? Tell me in the comments.

By the way...

I absolutely have to tell you about a great consultant that we retained at Hashrocket to spend a couple days with us discussing quality and helping our management team to figure out growth plans for 2010. His name is Steven M. Smith and I met him at the AYE Conference in Phoenix last month. Besides being a great management consultant, Steve specializes in experiential workshops. You should definitely consider hiring Steve to help you with your software development company or department.

New Hashrocket Client Video: Todd Siegel

One of the coolest things about shooting a lot of video around the office is that every so often we catch one of our clients on film (and they let us publish them.) In this episode, of what I hope to turn into a recurring season, meet Todd Siegel, who has proven to be one of our favorite clients.

We've done this type of interview before with Dave Cohn of Spot.us.

Agile Design, O RLY?

We had a great Hashrocket Book Club discussion today about a Cennydd Bowles article on A List Apart: Getting Real About Agile Design. Our discussion revolved around the integration of our very XP-like process with traditional and so-called "Agile Design", the evolution of design activities that traditionally have been very waterfall-like and involving heavy research phases.

Les made a pretty bold statement that design people are stuck where developers were 10 years ago, prior to wide adoption of Agile.

Here are the rest of my rough bullet point notes, in the hopes of getting a discussion started about this important topic.

• There is a trichotomy* when discussing "design": Experience, Application and Graphic. Or sometimes you say "design" and you mean all three. That makes it difficult for everyone I know to talk about "design" without getting really confused.
• User experience design involves the entire interaction of a user with a business and its technology, which makes it different than application and interaction design, which has more to do with the design of screen interactions and forms and pages.
• Projects should have mini-milestones that represent "user journeys" as described in the article -- stories chained together to represent a path through the application -- and different than the concept of an "epic story".
  
• The meaning of iterations still presents issues (even to us) in terms of thinking that they constitute weekly milestones. I say that iterations are nothing except dumb timeslices that enable tracking of velocity, but I realize that is far from a universal view in Agile circles. See The Story is The Iteration as practiced by Hashrocket, Pivotal Labs and others.
• It's hard to envision experience and application design as happening after storycarding, since the storycarding process is dependent on having that design already done.
• There are ways to start intertwining design with Agile the way that we're practicing it, but not like in the Bowles blog post, because Hashrocket usually acquires clients that have their application design done. Except that's not actually the case now, because since Andrew came on board we're participating in the earlier stages of the project, even starting at the concept phase.
• There is value in developers championing the user experience throughout the project, being more than just programming robots. This implies that our developers have design savvy.
• Customers are not experts in experience and application design and they cannot replace designers on XP projects.
• The comparison in the Bowles blog post between software and the movie industry is flawed, because movie projects don't do small or often releases.

* Yes, I know that trichotomy is not really a word. But "dichotomy" implies two things, not three. Update: As pointed out by Thufir in the comments, it is a word. (I originally checked and didn't find it in my dashboard dictionary.)

Corey Haines and RMM at Hashrocket

Corey Haines at Hashrocket / RMM from Hashrocket on Vimeo.

Join us in welcoming Corey Haines (aka The Software Journeyman) to Hashrocket for some pair programing with Stephen Caudill. Corey Haines travels around the country pair programming with whoever will feed him a scrumptious vegetarian meal and give him a spot to put his air mattress.

In the video, Corey arrives at Hashrocket (accompanied by Cory Foy) and introduces himself to the team. Then Obie, Corey and crew proceed to discuss software craftmanship and the project that Corey and Stephen will be working on for the duration of the week: RMM - the Rails Maturity Model application. A great conversation ensues that really hits home on what RMM is all about.

Morning Standup at Hashrocket

Morning Standup at Hashrocket from Hashrocket on Vimeo.

One of our best practices at Hashrocket is our daily "standup" meeting, which many Agile teams would refer to as a "scrum". We follow a format that we learned from Pivotal, in which each participant either passes or answers one of the following two questions:

• What is something cool, interesting or useful that I learned yesterday?
• What do I need help with to succeed today?

It's a great way for everyone to synch up in the morning and get off to a positive start for the day. The meeting is scheduled for a strict start at 9am and attendance is mandatory. Duration is 3 to 5 minutes at most, unless there's some extraordinary circumstance which needs discussion.

Now Available on Video: Hashrocket

Hashrock't Series: Jon and Sandro on Pair Programming from Hashrocket on Vimeo.

Shot on location at our offices in Atlantic Beach, Florida one day before our big move to new office space in Jacksonville Beach.

In one of the ways that we must be different than all other shops in our niche, we actually employ a documentary videographer who tries to capture what Hashrocket is all about on a daily basis. Maybe someday we'll pull together a "Hashrocket: The Movie", but for now my ambition is simply to provide our friends and fans a way of getting to know the Rocketeers and maybe learning something from watching us at work and play.