Interesting Things
- Ben discovered that Cmd+Opt+B is a magical time machine for iTerm, complete with a scroll bar for traveling back and forth in the buffer. He was quick to point out that this feature, cool as it is, will not actually send the user back in time.
Interesting Things
- Ian and Ben pointed out that alias_attribute, a little-known Rails helper, can be used to alias a method for an ActiveRecord attribute. Alias_method will not work for this purpose.
- JT informed us that Amazon Web Services has debuted a new memcache tool known as ElastiCache.
- Micah added that Google has announced an open source version of the Chromium browser for Android.
Ask for Help
- Nick was having problems with installing Lobot, a Pivotal gem to automate the creation of continuous integration (CI) instances. He was getting an error pertaining to syck parsing of a gemspec. Lee had seen this bug before, which relates to the strictness of YAML parsing in Syck versus Psych.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. 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.
Below is the description for a Ruby developer position for Bookish, a new venture backed by some of the biggest publishers in the world, who are redefining the way people discover, explore, and interact with books and authors.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. 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.
Are you a developer with a deep interest in beauty and health? You aren't? No worries, we wouldn't expect you to be! However, if you love Test Driven Development, Pair Programming and building awesome things with Rails, we want to talk to you. If you love beauty and health, even better!
You will be a big part of a small and dynamic team. Your input will matter.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. 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.
Red Rover is a profitable start up on a big mission – to accelerate the development of human potential by better organizing and connecting communities. Over 30,000 people use our software to connect to other people who share their passions and discover relevant information in their community. This work involves Ruby, HBase / Hadoop, and Lucene among other things.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. 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.
Improve the child welfare system with innovative technology that can help the most vulnerable families and children - that's our mission at Case Commons.
You can play a big part in transforming public sector human services by helping us take our Casebook case management system from pilot to platform, enabling case workers to use modern social networking technologies to track cases better, see the connections among the various people and agencies involved cases, be more effective and efficient, and improve the quality of life for families and children.
Your contribution will play out on a huge stage. Casebook is being used by a growing number of private and public child welfare agencies and many policymakers believe that Casebook can become the integration portal for additional government services, including health, education and human services.
... If you are looking for somewhere to do agile development that’s good for the soul,
... If you want to be a founding member of an internal development team,
... If you want to work on a project that is going to improve the lives of children and families,
... If you want to be on the leading edge of applying web 2.0 and social media technology to solving human service problems,
... If you want to partner and pair with one of the best (the best?) rails development companies around,
... If you are serious about Rails development,
... If you never worked with Ruby but believe there is no other way to code but TDD, pairing and aggressive refactoring?
........ We want to talk to you.
We had a bit of a head scratcher this week at the New York City office while working on Red Rover, a social directory for engaging students with their colleges and employees with their employer. We were trying to allow a CSV to be uploaded to the application, when it mysteriously failed to parse the CSV. We narrowed it down to being caused by a certain row with strangely encoded international characters (but not every row with them was a problem):
Fuentes,Jesús,"Cribbage, Chess, and Bridge Club",Treasurer
But another row with the same character with the same encoding would import fine:
Johnson,Lúisa,Dodgeball Club,President
I recently got the chance to use Twilio to connect college students to other people with their interests for Red Rover (a client of Pivotal). I've done SMS integrations over email before and considered it here; MMS2R is nice for that (and free of carrier charges) but Twilio sends and receives using a real phone number. Using Pat Nakajima's sms-rb I was able to quickly send out text messages:
require 'sms-rb'
SMS.twilio_id = "DE4DB33F"
SMS.twilio_secret = "ASDFGHJK123456"
SMS.twilio_phone = "+15555555555"
SMS.text("eat more cake", :to => "+13121234567")
By configuring Twilio to hit a URL in your rails app you can also receive messages easily:
class TextMessageParrotController < ApplicationController
def parrot
SMS.text("*SQUAWK* #{params[:body]} *SQUAWK*", :to => params[:from])
end
end
And it's as simple as that. Don't hesitate to try out Twilio. They give you an ample amount of SMS credit when you sign up — more than enough test messages to bootstrap any sort of SMS integration in your Rails application. It's a lot of fun!
Red Rover, by the way, is looking to hire some developers. It's a great company that is passionate about engaging students with their university and each other. Their technologies at work include Rails, Solr, rspec, SMS, hadoop, and RSS. But experience with Rails, knowledge of test driven development and great communication are what they are really hoping to have. I'd love to see folks in the New York City area who can come pair with us at pivotal, but working remotely is certainly possible too. Just shoot a mail to kevin < at > redroverhq.com if you are interested.
Our NYC office is growing and we need someone to help our systems keep up with demand. We're agile, fun, and believe in sustainable pace (no death marches), and lots of testing. We have daily catered breakfast and keep our fridges well stocked. We like to work in an open environment – no cubicles here.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. 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.
National Lab Day a New York, NY non-profit company, is looking for an Agile UI Developer to join their team. The full job posting follows.