Obie Fernandez

Heroku and GoDaddy CNAME

If you're trying to get Heroku working with your GoDaddy-hosted DNS, you're going to have problems adding a CNAME record for "@". The system will complain and ask for a valid hostname, even though GoDaddy's own documentation says that "@" is okay.

The solution is to use the name of your domain instead. A trailing period after the TLD seems to be optional. An A record for @ is not needed with this configuration.

The Hashrocket Way: Pair Programming

To use an idiom that Bryan Liles effectively coined at this year's Ruby Hoedown, at Hashrocket, we "pair all the fucking time". It is a vital part of The Hashrocket Way, our internal philosophy of how to most productively service our clients:

The photo above captures a normal morning at Hashrocket headquarters, where every desk is set up for effective pair-programming: 30" monitor, dual keyboards, dual mice. Carmelyne Thompson and Wes Gibbs are the pair in the foreground.

Veez Remsik, my inspiration for this post and one of Hashrocket's Rescue Mission experts, gives us a must-read personal account of pair-programming as a way of life:

Hashrocket has a few core philosphies that are essentially required for team members. Agile development processes, an adherence to ruby and rails best practices and idioms, and a firm belief in pair programming are three of the biggies. Of these three, pair programming is the technique that has changed me most, and required the most change in my thinking. And not surprisingly, pair programming has proven the most critical to my success at Hashrocket.

Veez has a traditional software development background (unlike the one that several of us 'rocketeers cultivated at places like Thoughtworks). I like the way he describes himself pre-Hashrocket: "You know, the one who does his best work in the morning with his headphones on and drinking an obscenely large coffee. The guy who types madly for a few select hours a day and, during those few hours, produces as much as regular-speed developers do over the course of a day."

Durran Jordan and Matthew Bass pair on our latest 3-2-1 Launch project. Quite often, one of the keyboard/mouse sets is replaced by an actual MacBook Pro in conjunction with the most excellent teleport utility from abyssoft.

Most Rails people I know profess adherence to Agile practices and principles, yet judging from the anecdotal evidence I've collected at conferences and comments made by our guest stars, pair-programming is still very much the exception. Make that real pair-programming, in the extreme programming sense, where all production code is produced by two developers sharing control of one workstation.

Getting a chance to truly pair for the first time is turning out to be one of our "guest stars" favorite experiences at Hashrocket. In the pic above, I captured Paul Barry and Hampton Catlin getting their first taste of pair-programming the way it's supposed to be done.

There are certainly challenges to making pair-programming part of normal business practices. Starting with the fact that it implies keeping an even number of people assigned to a project on a daily basis. Even at ThoughtWorks, where Agile is an important part of the culture, management did not necessarily make this aspect of pairing easy for us — as the principle "resource manager" of Hashrocket, I have to juggle the financial needs of our clients with our need to work in pairs. It's occasionally very tricky, but when you do it all the time, I assure you it gets easier.

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I'm trying to get back into blogging on a regular basis. The "Hashrocket Way" is a term that has gotten much traction for us internally as a catch-all description of what makes us special, and I plan to write about different aspects of that as much as possible.

About Rails and Ghettos

This is a post that has been a couple weeks in the making (in my head), but the more that time passes by the less interested I am in writing it. Nevertheless, there are a couple of points I want to get out there both for the record and for possible discussion.

First of all, it is obvious that Zed was using that ugly word in its current derogatory sense, and I'll keep that sense in my writing as well. According to the dictionary one of the definitions of ghetto is "an isolated group" or "a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity".

In the greater realm of IT?

Does that definition ring true of Rails in the greater realm of Information Technology, or even just the programming world? I don't think so. The Rails community is not an isolated group, having members across a wide, diverse, range of enterprises and groups of individuals, from the highest-paid professional consultants, to the humblest program-for-fun enthusiasts.

What about inferior status, or opportunity limitations? That doesn't ring true either. If anything, the mainstream fascination with dynamic languages was ignited by Ruby on Rails a couple of years ago, which gives popular Rails practitioners a disproportionate amount of influence (ahem) in the programming world, and a prominent voice in online conversations about the future of our craft.

From my own (admittedly-biased) viewpoint, Rails is continuing to explode in popularity. Among other things, my book The Rails Way is selling extremely well, and we just had to do a rush reprint because demand exceeded even our optimistic estimates. It's currently a top-seller on Safari (a good indicator of traditional corporate developer interest levels), and has been hovering in the hundreds ranking on all of Amazon.com.

But where are the jobs?

To those that would use the number of Rails-related listings on major job boards as evidence of opportunity limitations, I point out that due to extraordinary demand for Ruby talent in the marketplace, it is almost pointless to advertise Ruby job positions via conventional channels. The way to find Rails talent is via targeted Ruby job boards, word of mouth, and blogging. Counts on mainstream job boards are meaningless at best, misleading at worst.

Most Rails developers worth their salt are contracting, simply because it is very lucrative right now. Rates for premium Rails talent is now in the neighborhood of $200/hour and continuing to climb. Average Rails talent costs at least $100/hour.  The work is finding them, not vice-versa. Why are clients willing to pay so much? Because they know we are a cost-effective bunch, doing the same amount of work (as individuals) that would take multiple traditional programmers in other mainstream languages, and with higher-quality as the  "icing on the cake".

How about just in the Ruby community?

Considering Zed strictly within the confines of the Ruby community, and not in the much bigger sphere of programming, I think he's still wrong. Like a newbie OO programmer violating the rule prefer composition over inheritance, he made an is-a/has-a mistake. What is true perhaps, metaphorically, is that Rails has ghettos, and Zed made the mistake of attributing qualities of a ghetto to the whole.

What I"m trying to say is that there are groups of people that have come over to work in Rails, the city of Rails if you will, who have settled into neighborhoods that can be very dangerous (monetarily) to inexperienced clients.

But why can't Zed get a job then?

What put me off about Zed's rant was not so much the content, but rather that it achieved such wide circulation. It wasn't meant to be read so widely, and I don't believe that he had destructive intentions when he wrote it. I lived and worked with Zed for five months during 2007, a time in which we became (and remain) good friends. I swear to you that Zed is a good, friendly guy, in person. (His created, over-the-top, narcissist online persona is another story!) The rant was filled with tons of inside jokes and commentary that really only make sense to other clued-in Ruby people, stuff that comes across as just mean, stupid or crazy to everyone else.

For instance, a significant percentage of readers obviously understood from the rant that Zed is unemployed, starving, and/or stark-raving mad. All three could not be further from the truth. Zed is happily employed by a major, household-name financial institution in New York City, where he comes into work everyday with a nice shirt and tie, and leads a Rails (yes, Rails) development team. Of course, none of this is news to those of us that really know him, but the rest of the world got a totally different story.