Obie Fernandez

Ruby Heroes Speak (Pro Ruby Conference Series: Part 3)

It's hard to believe, but the US presidential election is only 14 days away, which means that the Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby conference is coming up in less than 4 weeks. Continuing my series about the conference, I'm going to blog about some of the speakers I have lined up for you. First up are a few guys that I highly respect, am lucky to count as friends and unflinchingly call "Rails Heroes" because of their longstanding contributions to the Ruby world.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz

Ezra is famous for being the creator of Merb and founder of Rails hosting superheroes Engine Yard. He is a production systems expert and widely acclaimed speaker within the Ruby on Rails world.

Ezra's talk will explore the history and current state of the art in deploying and maintaining scalable Ruby applications. Over the last four years we've gone through countless web servers and deployment scenarios on the path to the ultimate deployment environment. Ezra will do a brief history of where we've been, where we are now, and where we are headed for the future, including his groundbreaking ideas with regards to backend messaging design and a world of services pattern.

Josh Susser

Josh is without a doubt one of the most beloved characters in the Ruby scene. His blog has_many :through boasts over 8000 readers and he is a key player for Rails powerhouse Pivotal Labs, for whom he is spearheading an expansion into New York City.

Josh will be premiering a special talk titled "Ruby: Fragile or Agile". As a former Smalltalker, Josh lived through the experience of C++ eating Smalltalk's lunch, and will tell us what we should be on the lookout for as Rubyists so that the same thing doesn't happen to us. He will broach vital topics about the disciplines we need to exercise in using Ruby so that it can take over the Agile mindshare from mainstream languages.

Matt Pelletier

Matt's firm, Eastmedia, was one of the earliest professional design agencies to do heavy Rails work, including the first Ruby on Rails-based implementation of OpenID for Verisign and the official site of NFL football team The New York Jets. He gave me plenty of technical review help and contributed the production deployment chapter to The Rails Way, for which his name graces the cover of my book.

Matt is also very good friends with Zed Shaw and was the primary author of our book about Mongrel. His talk at the conference will show you why Mongrel is still relevant, how it works, how it fits into your deployment stack, and how it can be easily extended to serve custom requirements. You can get a taste of the subject matter in this InfoQ interview that I recorded with them last year.

Rails Summit Conference recap

That's me, delivering the closing keynote of the conference

Favorite parts of the conference

Here's a quick list of my favorites parts of the conference...

• The Brazilian (and Argentinian) "Raileros"... Simply awesome and super-enthusiastic bunch of people and I was so glad to be part of their special conference.
• The reception that my keynote talk about the "Hashrocket Way" got. I had a ton of attendees tell me afterward that they were very excited about adopting some of our Agile techniques and practices in their own operations.
• Pounding the tables, clapping and singing "We Will Rock You" along with what felt like another 100 conference attendees packed into a sushi restaurant in downtown Sao Paolo.
• Getting to spend quality time getting to know Dr. Nic and Chad Fowler, whoops I mean Chad Erik
• The look on my lovely Desi's face when she saw my presentation slide promoting DevChix at the end of the keynote. :)

Keynote Recap

I'm going to give this talk again this year, so I'm not posting the slides (which were mostly pics of the Hashrocket crew anyway). My 60 minute talk spanned the range of Agile practices that we use at Hashrocket, organized by the principles of the Agile Manifesto.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Among several other core practices, Hashrocket is a pair-programming shop primarily because we believe that pairing is a key way of emphasizing and leveraging the productivity of our people in effective ways. I spent a lot of time explaining how pairing works and its benefits.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

As Bryan says, "Test all the f*cking time!" There are other ways to put this principle into practice too, having to do with the test technology that we use.

Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation

Onsite customer is important, and our location on the beach in Florida plays into our ability to attract people to come work at our office. I also introduced some ideas about visual design, and when you should do design work on a project, that isn't necessarily what you would expect from a believer in extreme programming.

Responding to change over following a plan

I showed off Pivotal Tracker and spoke about how we use it. I also talked about the importance of standup meetings and how to do those effectively.

I can't recommend Pivotal Tracker enough for Agile teams. You should go sign up and try it for free.

(MSA Series #2) Cooperation and Reliance

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David Cohn, our Client's Representative on the Spot.Us project

The following two sections of our Master Services Agreement establishes who (as in, a specific person) is responsible for managing the relationship on behalf of your client. This is a critically-important bit of information to establish on a contractual basis when more than one stakeholder is involved in decision-making. Once the work has begun, make sure that important decisions are communicated back and forth through this person.

2. Cooperation
Client shall assist Hashrocket in the performance of its obligations under this Agreement and shall undertake the responsibilities specified in this Section 2 at its own expense. Client shall make available to Hashrocket a designated representative: [name of representative] (“Client’s Representative”), who shall be authorized to make binding decisions for Client regarding the obligations which are the subject of this Agreement, and shall perform or have performed other duties and requirements of Client as set forth in this Agreement or in an applicable Statement of Work.

3. Reliance
Client understands that Hashrocket shall rely upon Client’s Representative as having the authority specified in Section 2 herein and that all official communications from Hashrocket to Client shall be addressed to Client’s Representative.

The Client's Representative should be a party to all important decisions and project communications. If they are not directly the person involved in a decision or communicating it to you, make sure they are at least CC'd (assuming email). These clauses are your protection from accusations of having acted in a reckless or otherwise unauthorized manner.

Make sure to make an amendment to the agreement if the identity of the Client's Representative changes during the term of the agreement. At no point in time do you want it to become vague or unclear who it is that should be giving you definitive directions.

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.