Obie Fernandez

Startup Life Is

Working on raising a half-million dollar seed round. Getting commitments for half of said seed round. Feeling really good about the future. Networking. Making phone calls. Doing demos. Banging out Keynote presos.

Booking last minute tickets to San Francisco for pitch meetings with a couple of the most legendary personalities in the valley. Feeling proud of yourself and a little scared at the same time.

Having to multitask between coding and emails and phone calls with investors and service providers and customers and potential customers and lawyers and advisors. Signing documents. Emailing documents. Faxing documents. Coding. Managing. Snacking. Somehow keeping everything from falling apart.

Remembering to call kids. Remembering to call mom.

Spending a few minutes adding a message in your app's notification emails telling users to hit reply to add a comment. Routing said replies to your own inbox, as a test to see if anyone will actually use that feature. Realizing that it would probably be really bad if they actually did start using that feature, so biting the bullet and writing incoming email processing. Taking a few hours to get it all tested and working, but mostly because you have trouble getting a reliable SSH tunnel between the outside world and your local development environment. Getting lots of help from #lazytwitter and singing the praises of modern development tools and web services.

Words with friends.

Realizing you're not sure where you're going to sleep while you're on your trip to San Francisco. Realizing you probably should get a rental car so you can drive yourself down to Mountain View. Kicking yourself for not having more meetings lined up, to make better use of the trip. Rationalizing that the trip was too last minute anyway.

Putting the finishing touches on a major piece of functionality. Beaming with pride. Realizing it's 10:30pm and you had commitments tonight. Rushing home. Dragging yourself out to a cousin's birthday party past midnight even though you're exhausted.

Drinking. Karoekeing. Subwaying. Sleeping.

Waking at 9 even though you went to sleep at 4:30am. Not being able to fall back asleep because you're thinking of great ideas to work on once you get up. Reaching over and grabbing your notebook to start hacking on some ideas while still in bed. Hunger finally gets you out of bed at 10.

Remembering you better pick up your laundry because otherwise you won't have any clean underwear for said trip. Further realizing that you don't have any shoes with you that aren't flip flops or sneakers, because you've been traveling and living out of a suitcase for the last four months and forgot your nice shoes somewhere along the way.

Deciding that since it's Saturday you might as well stop by the barbershop and get a haircut on your way in to the office since it's been a few weeks and you don't want to look shaggy for the upcoming SF trip. Finally getting into the office at noon, to meet up with the rest of your team.

Putting the finishing touches on another major piece of functionality. Beaming with pride again.

Breaking for lunch and deciding to celebrate Saturday by turning left around the corner instead of right. Amazing yourself with a whole new array of lunch options, which you have neglected until now in favor of the same falafel place where you've been buying meals about 75% of the time for weeks.

Going back to the office and banging out yet another major piece of functionality. Beaming with pride again, but celebration is somewhat tempered by your back, which is hurting since you've been sitting all day, everyday, for the past week. Deciding to alleviate said hurt by hanging upside down for several minutes, suspended by ankle shackles. Having your lead engineer hover nervously around you during your suspension, nervous that you might fall and break your neck prior to close of current funding round.

Getting less and less ambitious with coding as energy wanes until eventually you decide to call it a night and go home at 10:30pm. Buying a hummus wrap on the way home, because you realize that you forgot to eat dinner during your exciting all-day coding session. Eating said hummus wrap on the subway.

Walking home from subway stop in 100 degree heat. Smiling at the wide open fire-hydrant flooding the street next to the building where you've been living. Thinking that there were probably a bunch of kids playing in that hydrants cooling stream hours earlier. Feeling nostalgic for simpler times, but realizing you really couldn't ask for things to be any better.

Packing to trip. Turning down offers to go out with friends. Getting into bed at a reasonable hour. Not going to sleep.

Writing a blog post.

Saying goodnight.

 

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.

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.

Inverted Sensibilities

nextangler: I certainly have a line as well
nextangler: And it goes at violence
obie: LOL you certainly are a european
nextangler: Which, funny enough, seems to be the inverse of a lot of people here
obie: americans have hangups about sex, but not violence
nextangler: And that's some fucked up shit
obie: yep
nextangler: That needs to be attacked at any given opportunity
obie: violently?
obie: :)
nextangler: By arguments and pictures of mating!!

Ada Lovelace Role Model: Desi McAdam

On Ada Lovelace Day, it's my pleasure to sing high praises for my best friend and partner of over 8 years, one of the most wonderful, hardworking and ethical people that I've ever met in my life: Desi McAdam.

Not only is Desi a role-model and example to women software developers through her tireless work as a Principal Consultant at Hashrocket, she's also the founder of DevChix, an organization devoted to advocating women's place in our unarguably male-dominated industry.

Not trying to be immodest, but you know that saying: "Behind every great man is a great woman"... well in this case it's certainly true. I'd be lost without my beloved Desi.

The Way I Getting Things Done by Lark

The Way I Getting Things Done by Jon Larkowski from Hashrocket on Vimeo.

A focused six minute and forty second talk on the topic of GTD and staying "in the flow" by one of the first Rocketeers, Jon "Lark" Larkowski.

This is just one in an album of videos shot at the latest REFRESH Jacksonville event.

Incidentally, I've been doing Inbox Zero for at least a couple of weeks and it has really decreased my stress levels. Everything emailed to me gets either deleted or archived as soon as I look at it. (As a great side effect, the load of forcing myself to deal with every incoming message caused me to unsubscribe from a bunch of spam and mailing lists which I've lost interest in over time.) 

Unless I can reply or deal with it immediately, any email that needs further attention gets a yellow star and is archived. When I'm in the mood to work on reply and followups, I go to the star folder and start working my way down the list of yellow stars. If something has "gone cold" since the time I starred it, meaning that it's been followed-up to the satisfaction of the sender, or is now pending for awhile, I turn the star blue, meaning it's "on ice".

Oh yeah, I use GMail and the Superstars Lab feature. Don't you?

Anyway, stuff that's urgent to take care of gets flagged with a red bang icon. Stuff that's been taken care of gets a green checkmark. Stuff that's old still gets buried sometimes. I admit it's not a perfect system, but it's way better than what I had before.

Suggestions welcome, as always.

Retrospective 2008

I've been trying to write this post for several days. The problem is there's just so much to cover; it's overwhelming! To get past my writer's block, I'm going to structure this as "at least one, but not more than a few paragraphs per month". Let's see how it goes...

January

The year was rung in with a bang due to the stir over Zed's rant calling Rails "a ghetto". I did my fair share of apology on behalf of the Ruby community. As the maelstrom raged, I launched my consultancy company, Hashrocket, right at the start of the year. The initial team was the 4 developers of CityCliq: Desi, Lark, Big Tiger and myself. We start out intending to make money with a mix of products and consulting. Our stylish website (by nGenWorks) attracts a lot of positive attention, but not as much as our revolutionary 3-2-1 Launch concept. We attract our first couple of clients, including a major Fortune 100 company that we end up servicing for 9 months.

Engine Yard gets a 3.5 million Series A from Benchmark Capital which I think is the last article I wrote for InfoQ before going into an unplanned hiatus due to other resposibilities.

Mid-month I finally get fed up with Jroller and setup my own blog on MovableType. Computer World magazine calls me a "rockstar coder" in the same breath as Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham. Mostly cause of the hott pic of me on my homepage, but flattering nonetheless. By the end of the month, my book, The Rails Way, begins hitting bookshelves nationwide in earnest. Sales and reviews are stellar, a huge relief and source of satisfaction after almost two years of hard work.

All blog posts in January 2008

February

I post an entry on "Super Tuesday" that ends up being the most widely-read thing I've ever written: Ten Reasons I Support Barack Obama for President. I can't help but feel a little smug about the election, although it remains to be seen how he will handle the unprecendented challenges we're facing as a nation. I'm still confident everything is going to be okay. The entry ends up being my only post in February, as I start to feel the crush of responsibility involved in running a thriving business.

Addison-Wesley and I begin discussing the concept of having a Ruby conference. At first we are going to have a conference specifically about testing, eventually the idea morphs into Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference or as Josh Susser christens it, "ObieConf". I have initial conversations with Zach Inglis about coming to work for Hashrocket. (He eventually spends most of the year with us.) We also double in size (with the addition of Corey, Carmelyne, Ben and Sandro) and pick up our next handful of clients, some of which are affected by a massive outage of Amazon S3. I can't remember exactly, but I think it's around this time that Hashrocket figures out that in-house product development needs to be put on indefinite hold pending available capital and opportunities.

March

The Rails Way is awarded a Jolt Productivity Award at the SD West show. I write about how lots of big companies are using Ruby on Rails, but Hashrocket mostly works with startups such as Event-Seek, who we first met in March. Near the end of the month I travel to Philly for the Emerging Tech conference, where I light up a big, racuous panel discussion with my valiant defense of Rails against Java and Microsoft non-believers. I also travel to SxSW in Austin where I meet Zach, Rein and the incomparable Tim Pope for the first time -- it isn't long before they guest star and then join Hashrocket.

April

Hashrocket continues to grow as we hire local superstars and longtime buddies Wes and Les. One of my best friends, protege and three-time colleague, Durran Jordan, joins Hashrocket. Big Tiger's brother "Veez" joins the team too. Nepotism is awesome, as long as you have talented and hardworking friends and family!

We are introduced to Pivotal Tracker, which immediately takes hold and changes Hashrocket project management forever.

At this point in the year the stress of the job is already grinding on me. I manage to take a week off to vacation with my kids, flying us to Toronto for some sight-seeing and snowboarding, albeit way too late in the season.

May

One of my favorite photographs is published in Denver's 5250 Magazine as a two-page spread, scoring me some extra cash and photography cred. Unless I'm mistaken, Hashrocket doesn't grow in May, which is a surprise to everyone. We do, however, pick up our first international customer and even consider the possibility of opening an office in Ireland.

Hashrocket attacks Railsconf 2008 en masse, which costs me a fortune, but is worthwhile in terms of publicity. I'm pleasantly shocked at the attendance numbers for my Sunday morning talk about "the worst Rails code you've ever seen" and even more shocked that me and Rein do a good job delivering the talk despite severe sleep deprivation.I get super excited about MagLev, but then totally drop the ball on getting involved with it. Maybe 2009 will be different...

All blog posts in May 2008

June

Before I can hardly catch my breath being back from Portland, I fly of to Netherlands and make a bunch of new friends in Amsterdam at the Ruby en Rails conference, where I deliver a repeat of my Railsconf talk.

I make last minute plans for a summer trip around the world with my kids, departing in late June. Great help and advice from the sustainable travel experts at Global Basecamps makes it possible. (Tell them I sent you!) The trip will involve taking three weeks off work, but can Hashrocket survive my absence?

During June I make several wrong-headed personal decisions, which come back to haunt me and wreak emotional havoc a couple of months later. What can I say? Relationships are hard, even after being with someone you love for 7 long and rollercoaster-like years.

All blog posts in June 2008

July

One of the happiest months of my life, as I shed my worklife and emotional burdens to spend three weeks jetting around the globe with my children. We have a blast touring South Africa, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and San Francisco. Altogether an unforgettable trip and lots of pictures to prove it.

While I'm gone everything at Hashrocket gets switched over to git/github from subversion (and at that point it would take me a few months to catch up to the rest of the team in truly learning git). By the time I get back from the trip, it's beginning to dawn on me that 1) I'm seriously overworked and 2) things tend to go wrong at Hashrocket when I'm away from the office. I can't dwell on it too much, because I'm off to Toronto to awe and entertain the RubyFringe audience with a crazy talk called Do The Hustle.

Back in the office, I get to talking to my caboo.se buddy Courtenay about an acquisition or merger of ENTP with Hashrocket. Seriously. Some excitement (not entirely positive) ensues, particularly over cultural differences. Eventually negotiations fall apart over disagreements about the name of the combined entity. I think Hashrocket is a better brand, but Courtenay doesn't want to give up his 4-letter domain name. Oh, what could have been... :)

Near the end of the month, I write my only blog entry for July, a weighty piece entitled Becoming a Worldly Person, which tells the story of my departure from the Jehovah's Witness religion 10 years ago. Somewhat unexpectedly, I get a ton of heartfelt responses, especially via email.

August

The summer grinds on and I agree to keynote the South American Rails Summit in Brazil later in the year. My topic: The Hashrocket Way, a term that we use internally to describe our Agile process and unique business practices. Hampton Catlin does a stint as one of our 3-2-1 Launch guest stars, and ruffles  Rocketeer feathers with some of his controversial opinions on testing.

Most of Hashrocket piles into our RV and drives up to Huntsville to attend Jeremy McAnally's Ruby Hoedown conference. Our crazy RV party is memorialized on video by Greg from Rails Envy, featuring obscene ranting by a very drunk Tim Pope and several of us constructing a beer-pong table out of pool noodles and duct-tape.

Trying to be responsible, I cancel my trip to Burning Man so that I can focus on running Hashrocket, much to the dismay and disappointment of my best friend, Nate. (Someday, dude. Someday. I promise.)

I end the month by ecstatically signing Foy Savas to write The Merb Way for Addison-Wesley's pro ruby series. (By the way, we've decided to continue work on the book for release as early as possible this year!)

All blog posts in August 2008

September

To be continued... soon.

The Me Meme

I'm working on another installment of the MSA series, but in the meantime I took a break and did the following silly blog meme.

Via Marc Fleury

1.Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4 Post these instructions with your picture. 

Security in a Relationship

From "Gift From The Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.

Becoming a Worldly Person

About 10 years ago my life changed forever. Together with my wife and baby girl, I left behind dozens of family members and scores of friends, and moved hastily to a new life in Atlanta, Georgia. Recent events have reminded me that without that move I would never have come close to achieving the accomplishments that define my life today. I am celebrating tonight and reminding you that sometimes, all you need to break out of a miserable situation is the courage to make the first big leap.

The year was 1998 and luckily for me the job market for Java programmers was white-hot! It took only about two weeks from the time I decided to move to secure a new position, even including a short flight down to Atlanta to scout out neighborhoods. Once the wheels were in motion everything moved very quickly. The new company paid for our relocation and we were on our way.

A few days before we actually left, I clearly remember walking up the brick stairs of the hundred-year old house that I grew up in and ringing the doorbell, knowing it would be one of the last times I would do so again. The front door opened and I drew a deep breath as I stepped through the old, creaky-floored foyer and sat down on the sofa. My parents accepted the surprise news sadly, but with a sense of resignation. Did they see it coming or were they just shocked? I had given them no warning and even worse I was taking away their first and only granddaughter.

What many people don’t realize, even many of my close friends and associates, is that the sudden relocation was not just a savvy career move – it was actually an important part of an escape plan. My wife and I had decided to leave, for the sake of our sanity, to put distance not just between our immediate family and us, but more importantly, to gain some breathing room. Freedom beckoned loudly and with great appeal after a lifetime of involuntary servitude. We had been born into, but were about to break free of a cultish organization devilishly determined to undermine our happiness: Jehovah’s Witnesses!

The following will undoubtedly sound harsh to anyone unfamiliar with the machinations of fundamentalist religious institutions, but serves to illustrate the gravity of the situation: My explicit instructions to my mom and dad were clear: “Respect our privacy! If you want to see Taylor or us again, do not tell anyone in the congregation where we’ve moved to or how to get in contact with us.”

At the time, I was particularly concerned that the elders would “come after us”, so to speak. But what could they do? This is still a free country isn’t it? Not against people that wield mind control and spiritual damnation as their weapons. To face the elders would be to risk disfellowshipping for apostasy, excommunication from all of our friends and family still stuck inside the church. You see, willful abandonment of the faith is the absolute worst sin that one of Jehovah’s Witnesses can commit.

Since we were trying to leave the church, wouldn’t excommunication just help us be done with it more conclusively? The thing is, at the time we were alone in our journey out of the cult. Almost all of our immediate family and friends were still in the church – speaking to or associating with someone who is disfellowshipped is also an offense worthy of excommunication – to allow it would introduce a lifetime impediment to open and free communication with most of our friends and family. I assure you that the threat of shunning is a very effective tool for mind-control.

Luckily ten years ago there was a loophole, which may not exist anymore. Just disappear! After temporary confusion, the congregation elders would basically shrug and continue on with their lives. So that’s exactly what we did. We did not play by their rules. We used our intellect, summoned the necessary courage and made our own rules. Importantly, we rejected the will of the faithful and discrete slave, a term that the Watchtower uses to describe the group of old men that govern their religion, based on a perverted translation and interpretation of Matthew 24:14.

In that verse Jesus asks: “Who is that faithful and discreet slave, that took care of his master’s goods until his return? He will be rewarded... blah, blah, blah” (Quote from memory and probably off a bit) According to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the governing body of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society is that slave, of course! Because they say that they are! It’s pure, unadulterated circular-reasoning bullshit of the finest vintage, and believe it or not it’s the only text in the bible that the whole farcical JW house of cards is built upon.

That I’m not able to erase that bible verse from my mind, despite years of hardcore atheism is a testament to how often it was drilled forcefully into my unwilling self.

Perhaps today it is easier to fade away from the cult, but ten years ago I was certain that we would face some degree of persecution from the local elders in Georgia, if they could find us. That’s why under a veil of secrecy and nine-hundred miles of interstate later, I began a new life in the sunny south of this country, asked everyone I met to just call me “Obie” and got busy living the rest of my life as a worldly person.

Now the term “worldly person” is what Jehovah’s Witnesses cult members call non-believers and is always used in a derogatory sense. Ironically, to everyone else it means, “experienced and sophisticated”. In that spirit, tonight I raise my cup in a toast to everyone that has had the courage to break free from the shackles of fundamentalist religious belief, of the Jehovah’s Witness variety or otherwise. I salute your courage and resolve and wish you the best of success in all your endeavors.