Obie Fernandez

Homeschooling Reconsidered

Stanislav asks:

Would you work with micromanaging boss, no salary, and all your work thrown away?

Unfortunately, my subject line ruins the punchline of his (non-joke) post about institutionalized public education, which you should go read anyway. I get the impression he opted out of for his young daughter and it made me think about my own kids, who are 11 and 8 years old. My daughter is about to start middle school and my son is going into fourth grade. They're relatively smart and athletic kids, and overall they are growing up in a typical American suburban way of life. I really haven't given much thought about homeschooling, even though my religious, borderline nut-job parents homeschooled all four of my younger siblings after struggling with their perception of my own high-school career.

The thing is, school really is just a glorified daycare center. As an intelligent, misunderstood and equally rebellious kid, school didn't do anything for my discipline and life prospects other than keep me out of trouble (and poorly at that, once I hit high school). I spent my entire childhood with my head buried in books and computers, and I'm sure that most of what I learned during those years was self-taught. What school taught me above all is that other people are cruel and stupid, and to always, unfailingly question and challenge authority figures. (It has served me well, I think.)

So as I reflect on my children and their school experience, I have to ask myself some tough questions. Given the luxury of time and resources to be able to afford the investment of homeschooling, am I willing to consider it as a realistic option? The actual schooling wouldn't even have to happen at "home", since I could easily set up an office with two desks here at Hashrocket HQ and treat them as junior interns.

Any of you dealing with similar questions?

Upcoming RubyFringe Talk: Do the Hustle

Sales is an art that very few technical people have mastered. Very few. It takes patience, confidence, empathy and whole slew of other skills mixed together -- a brew that is seriously difficult for many geeks to figure out.

In my RubyFringe talk, I will leverage my experience successfully selling consulting services for both Thoughtworks and Hashrocket to answer some of the following questions:

• How do I figure out how to price my services?
• How do I figure out the kind of work I want to sell?
• How do I write contracts and statements of work?
• What about proposals?
• And RFPs? (Requests for Proposal)
• How do I close the deal?

The word "hustle" can mean "to sell aggressively" and has a mostly negative connotation, but the main reason I used it in the title was for catchiness. (And, I guess, also cause I like the disco song of the same name.)

I hear there's only a few registration spots left.

Workaround to Get All Your Twitter @Replies

Twitter's show me all @replies has not been working, which means you don't see people's replies to you unless you follow them. If you have a high ratio of followers to people you follow, you can really come off as a dick because of this bug. Thanks Twitter!

Luckily there's a workaround involving Tweetscan

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Do a search for your Twitter username and subscribe to the resulting dynamic RSS feed. Problem solved. Hopefully Twitter gets their act together soon, though. Even though their scaling issues have nothing to do with Ruby on Rails, they still give plenty of FUD-fuel to the haters.

Railsconf 2008 Slides for Worst Rails Code...

I'm happy to make available the slides for my well-received Railsconf 2008 presentation: The Worst Rails Code You've Ever Seen (and how not to write it yourself)

obiefernandez-worstrailscode-railsconf2008_slides.pdf

Greg Pollack (of RailsEnvy.com fame) included an interview with me about my talk in his Railsconf 2008 Videos collection. Direct link to the Vimeo clip is here.

I want to publicly thank Rocketeer Rein Henrichs for his somewhat late-minute agreement to co-present, even though it meant being up and alert at 9 am on Sunday morning after extreme sleep deprivation for the duration of the conference. We were able to riff off each other and crack up the audience -- without resorting to too many inside jokes. (Did you see what I did there, Rein?)

I also want to thank all my readers that responded to my call for bad code examples a couple of weeks ago. Explore the comments on that post for some good examples that I ended up not using.

One of the coolest things about the talk was that several community-benefiting ideas popped up because of it. I mentioned the possibility of signing authors to write a Rails Antipatterns book for my series from the stage, and Chad and Tammer from Thoughtbot volunteered pretty much immediately. Greg from RailsEnvy also suggested that he help me get the talk recorded as a video podcast and that'll happen sometime soon I'm sure, as well as the idea of turning the talk into some sort of recurring video podcast by me and Rein. We'll see... copious free time and all that being what it is.

Oh yeah, on a final self-congratulatory note, I also claim bragging rights for packing the room with 1000+ attendees on a Sunday morning! Maybe the scheduling gods will be kinder to me next year in Vegas?