Obie Fernandez

Announcing: The Merb Way by Foy Savas

Merb is definitely the next big thing in the Ruby world. I don't think that it will ever displace Rails as king of modern web frameworks, but Merb's popularity for smaller web projects and simple web services is hard to ignore. By signing Foy Savas to write The Merb Way, I am hoping to continue the Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series tradition of giving readers the best possible information from experienced practitioners.

Foy has been actively involved in the Merb open-source ecosystem for over a year, particularly with DataMapper. He uses Merb in his day-to-day activities as a full-time application developer and is an enthusiastic evangelist for the framework. He will be working on The Merb Way book full-time, and we hope to have it published early next year.

Incidentally, you can meet Foy in person in Boston on November 17-20 at the Addison-Wesley Voices that Matter: Professional Ruby Conference where he will be introducing the audience to the wonders of Merb development.

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.

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.