Geez, What Happened?
Ok, so you may not know, all my sites are running from my data center at home. Yes, I do have a rack of servers I maintain at home. So, when the weird ass snow storm hit my area, the power went down and went down hard. I lost power on Saturday and just got it back. That’s three plus days. Obviously my UPS’s doesn’t last that long and all my sites, including this one, went down.
So, why didn’t I just redirect to my backups at EC2?
The simple answer is that I have a family and had to evacuate them to safety since without electricity, I have no running water. I also got rid of my other remote servers to save some money. Guess the savings weren’t worth it. They’re all coming back.
NeXT vs. Sun
This is quite old, but I nevertheless find this very entertaining. It also made me think about how I’d like to work. Wouldn’t it be great if we all can work in peace without useless meetings and interruptions like these programmers?
Rubyist’s Life 201109
I’ve spoken about current working conditions of many developers in this post. Here’s a video to Nigel Marsh’s talk on balancing work and life. For those of you in US, today’s Labor Day and I hope you’re in “disconnect” as I am (or trying to).
Why I Don’t Have Code on Github
Because I have a fucking job and I don’t post my clients/employer’s intellectual properties for public to see. I’ll post code to Github when I’m unemployed and have nothing on my resume.
Ruby Initializer
Warning: This is obviously a rant and a joke. However, it does contain some valuable tutorial.
Management
If you’re a manager or is about to become one, try these lessons I’ve learned in both business school (I have a degree in Finance) and years of my experiences.
The best managers do not “manage”, instead, they inspire and create the right working environment for others to flourish. They also hire the right people for the job with the personality that fits the team, no matter how talented someone is. The same goes for getting rid of anyone that throws off the team balance.
Here’s my list of “things”:
- Always eat together. I made it mandatory for everyone to eat lunch together. I never compromised on this and you shouldn’t either.
- Don’t interfere with productive creativity. In other words, stay out of the way and let people soar.
- Learn to sell your ideas. The sales skill I learned (yes, it’s learned, not born with as some people would say) still applies to all aspects of my life.
- Always put yourself in their shoes.
- Entertain. People should look forward to talking to you, not dread it
- Protect your people. Never throw anyone under the bus, even if they deserve it.
- Listen!
My New Sandy Bridge Hackintosh – Oh Yeah!
Rails Installer?
I’m always about using the right tool for the job. So, when I saw that Rails Installer was created for those using Windows, I was wondering, WHY?
If you’re really stuck with Windows, you can always run Linux in VM. Why go through all the trouble? I just don’t get it.
In case you don’t know, Microsoft started out as a company that made BASIC. In fact, they are still in business of selling compilers and developer tools. Since Windows is the OS that drives all their other businesses, I don’t think they really could care less give about Ruby, which by the way competes with their product line. The fact that Ruby runs on non-Microsoft server OS probably angers them as they can’t hook customers into buying their stuff.
My Project Management Tool
Few years ago, I was interviewing for a development manager position and was asked what tools I use to manage my projects. I told the interviewer that I use Mind Manager and mind mapping to effectively manage my projects. He looked at me like a deer in headlights and asked why not use a spreadsheet? I explained why but was told that I had to use a spreadsheet. Needless to say, I didn’t get that job.
Rather than go into details about how I do it here, take a look at this video from Mindjet, the maker of Mind Manager. I’ve been doing similar for years, but the tool now makes it much easier.
Rails 3 App Deployment Observations
I already have two Rails 3 apps that are in production. While deploying these, I observed the following.
- Painfully obvious, you need to add a task to perform bundle install in your Capistrano script.
- When deploy hangs, it’s usually because Bundler is prompting for password.
- Haven’t found anything significant different from Rails 2.x.
- Ruby 1.9.2 really is much faster.
- While it solves a ton of problems, Bundler manages to piss me off on regular basis.
- Having multiple Ruby versions with Passenger is not a good idea. Besides, VPS’s are cheap these days.
I’m sure you guys are feeling the Capistrano screencast coming. However, the reason why I’m holding up the screencast is that PeepCode has that subject covered rather thoroughly. Check out Geoffrey’s good work, it’s only $9 and if you can’t invest that little in yourself, then I have nothing good to say.
