One project is releasing soon but has not yet been indexed by Google, what’s the best way to get Google to index the website quickly?
How do people distinguish between nil and a cache miss when using Memcached and Ruby?
:symbol to represent nilform_for @object sometimes posts to the wrong action, has anybody else seen this?
“Recommendations for a configurable embedded video player”
Please see my previous post regarding Movember for context.
Pivotal Labs CEO Rob Mee has announced that he will match the highest qualifying donation for coloring my mustache. In return, he gets to pick the color of half the ‘stache.
The largest donation to me or to the Pivots-West team before midnight tonight (PST) earns the right to color HALF of my mustache. Rob will match that donation for the right to color the other half. Don’t fret, he’s been researching clashing color schemes.
You will still receive a whole autographed photo of your very own, and now your very welcome donation to men’s health will be twice as large!
On a current project, we’ve just switched from GemInstaller to Bundler for managing our application’s gems.
All in all, the transition was painless… in our development environments. Of course, in order to keep things on running smoothly on the continuous integration box, we amended our rake cruise:spec task to start by running sh "gem bundle".
So, wonderful! Any changes to our gem dependency list will picked up when cruise starts and made available for that “build”; there’s no need to log in and make any manual updates. Right?
Not quite. We’re using the disable_system_gems option and, in that case, Bundler (very intentionally) modifies your GEM_PATH such that only “vendor’d” gems are available to the application. Which of course means that Bundler itself, being “a gem to bundle gems”, is unavailable when that sh "gem bundle" command is run.
Our solution: bundle Bundler, obviously! That’s right, in our Bundler Gemfile we’ve included gem "bundler". Now, after a single manual execution of gem bundle to pick up the bundled Gem Bundler gem bundle (heh), any subsequent Gemfile changes (to gems other than Bundler) get picked up at the start of the build… and we’re cruisin’
Have another solution? Please let us know in the comments.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide is bootstrapping startups, including helping them interview and hire. We currently have clients looking for skilled engineers to build their development teams. This is an excellent opportunity to learn Extreme Programming by working side-by-side with Pivotal’s talented and experienced developers while at the same time getting in on the ground floor of a small and dynamic product team.
Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring. General technical requirements include serious web development experience, and a significant subset of Ruby, Rails, CSS, JavaScript, or MySQL.
Here are short descriptions of Togetherville and Honk, San Francisco-based clients of Pivotal Labs currently looking for developers. The full job postings follow.
Togetherville is an early-stage, funded startup at the crossroads of learning, technology and society. Starting with our highly-respected and successful Funders and Advisors, we are building a team that is excited about getting a ground-floor startup experience and is capable of consistently meeting and exceeding the high expectations of success we have set for ourselves. We are extremely passionate about what we’re doing and just as passionately looking for focused and fun people to join our team. We are not hung up how many years of experience you have. We’d rather start with your potential and what you can do and then go from there!
Honk.com is a new online automotive website that will make car shopping fun and social. We will enable consumers to experience a new way to explore new cars. We have partnered with a top social website to deliver this new way of car shopping and are funded by one of the largest media companies in the world. Our small team is made up of an experienced group of humble, efficient, and hyper-passionate individuals who are veterans of the automotive industry and social media space. We are proud of our ego-less culture, one that promotes team thinking, not individual accolades. If you’re interested in helping prove that social media and car buying go hand in hand, social networks serve a bigger purpose than keeping up with one’s day, and a small team can outdo the work of an army – then we may have a seat waiting for you.
If you are interested or for more information please contact the company directly. This is an exclusive service provided to our clients, no external companies or recruiters please.
Full job postings follow.
Are you interested in using your Ruby on Rails dev skills to change the world?
Togetherville is building our founding tech team. This is your big chance to get into a very early startup and help build its foundation. We want someone who is tired of the same ol’ same ol’ and wants to take their skills and capabilities to the next level as a technology leader and company builder.
You will begin your Togetherville experience working alongside the stellar engineers at Pivotal Labs. This will help you build your skills (and show them off) as we rapidly build out an amazing new way for kids and parents to engage online.
If you are somebody who has:
Then, WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU!
Togetherville is an early-stage, funded startup that is sitting at the crossroads of learning, technology and society. Starting with our highly-respected and successful Funders and Advisors, we are building a team that is excited about getting a ground-floor startup experience and is capable of consistently meeting and exceeding the high expectations of success we have set for ourselves.
We are extremely passionate about what we’re doing and just as passionately looking for focused and fun people to join our team. We are not hung up how many years of experience you have. We’d rather start with your potential and what you can do and then go from there!
If you think this job description was written with you in mind, contact us. We’ll tell you more about Togetherville, the job opening and the change we are making in the world!
Contact – jobs@togetherville.com
Honk.com is a new online automotive website that will make car shopping fun and social. Consumers experience a new way to explore new cars, focusing on what other real people actually think, not product specifications or biased editorial. Our site is 100% consumer driven with no journalists or former race car drivers telling you what minivan or sedan you should purchase. Instead, users find real people sharing their opinions and experiences. We have partnered with a top social website to deliver this new way of car shopping and are funded by one of the largest media companies in the world. Thankfully, our partners allow (and encourage) us to remain financially independent, unpolitical, and fast-moving… a true start up.
Our small team is made up of an experienced group of humble, efficient, and hyper-passionate individuals who are veterans of the automotive industry and social media space. We are proud of our ego-less culture, one that promotes team thinking, not individual accolades. If you’re interested in helping prove that social media and car buying go hand in hand, social networks serve a bigger purpose than keeping up with one’s day, and a small team can outdo the work of an army – then we may have a seat waiting for you.
Honk is developing a platform of distributed applications and a destination website that will engage consumers’ existing social networks. To be clear, we are not building yet another community or social network. Many of our social applications will reside on our partners’ sites with the intent to drive users to honk.com for a richer experience, including unique content, interaction, and transaction-oriented tools. We will continue to expand our product over the next twelve months. In addition to deep knowledge of Ruby on Rails and Agile / Test-Driven Development precepts, we hope you have a thorough understanding / are comfortable with:
Previous experience working in online automotive or social media is desired, but definitely not required. Honk is currently located in San Francisco with some ties to Los Angeles. Our ideal candidates should reside in one of these two major metro areas, although we are open to “off site” developers who have the right skills and background.
Please send inquiries to Bruce Krysiak, CTO: techjobs@honk.simplicant.com
RubyConf is in town and the holiday season is almost upon us. It is a perfect time to open our doors and welcome the Rails and XP community to our San Francisco headquarters. From 6:30 until 9-ish on Wednesday, November 18th, we will have catered snacks and beverages and a convival gathering of the extended Pivotal Labs family and our friends. RSVP by purchasing a free ticket from the Eventbrite posting, and we look forward to seeing you there!
Movember is in full swing and Pivotal teams have already raised over $2K for dude cancer research! To push that number higher, hopefully much higher, I am auctioning off the color of my mustache. Take a look at this fuzzy lip warmer and consider it in pink or green or blue. Which would you choose?
Well, the individual with the highest new contribution to me or to the Pivots-West team between now and 11:59 p.m. PST on Wednesday, November 17th, gets to name the color. I will color my ‘stache by 9 a.m. Friday morning, November 20th, and I will wear it thusly colored for the rest of the month. In addition picking my exact hue-miliation, you will also receive an authentic autographed photo of me and my mustache, sporting your color of choice.
Thanks to everyone who has already donated and to all those yet to donate, please consider even $10 for this worthy cause. To date, Movember has raised $47 million globally, making it the world’s largest charity event for men.
We’ve pooled some Pivot shared tech news feeds and made this feedburner feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/pivotal-news-network
The content is in the spirit of Blabs, so we hope readers here might find it to be useful. See what you think.
I have an RSS feed, and I’d like to make a little news page out of it with the ability to post comments. Having done a quick survey of what’s available, I’m thinking of doing nothing. But I’d like to find out what others have to say about tools available.
General requirements:
I’d like to take an RSS feed and make a nice news page out of it.
No mangling or truncating of articles in the feed.
It’d be great if I could tie comments in. That might mean, for instance, dropping in disqus.
I’d rather not have to write, deploy, or maintain any code. But if there’s some set of tools/apis I could easily tie together with code, I’d consider it (some Heroku-type setup, for instance).
Examples of sites I consider to be at least partially what I’m driving at:
If I had to write code, I could imagine using something like feedzirra, sticking it on a many-times-per-hour cron job, and writing out a page and dropping in disqus.
Thoughts?
Anyone have any IP Geolocation software recommendations?
- MaxMind provides downloadable databases and updates
- Google provides an api called google.loader.ClientLocation
Firebug binds up and forces me to restart Firefox when modifying CSS.
- Try Safari or Webkit. You can add css styles to a class on an element by editing an existing element, finishing the current style with a semi-colon, and declaring a new style.
class MyClass
named_scope :in_progress, lambda { |*args| param = (args.empty? ? true : args.first); {:conditions => {:in_progress => param} }}
#MyClass.in_progress # < return all in progress records
#MyClass.in_progress(false) # < return all non-in-progress records
#MyClass.in_progress(true) # < return all in-progress records
end
Rubymine 2.0 RC2 is out. Release notes include better performance and reduced memory usage.
Pivotal Labs will be a stop on the Startup Crawl during Rubyconf.