Good morning! Today Ben Woosley and I will be live-blogging what’s going on during Goruco at Pace University.
You can check out some photos of the conference.
Welcome to Goruco!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
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We have a winner!
Friday, May 29, 2009
We have a winner in the Pivotal Tracker GoRuCo Haiku Contest.
Collin Miller submitted the winning entry:
Rivers of Action
Clearly Sculpt a Way Forward
My Path is Now Clear
We thank everyone for participating. There were a number of great entries, but this piece really stood out.
Collin, come on down tomorrow and say hi. I’ll be there all day enjoying the conference with some other folks from Pivotal Labs and demoing Pivotal Tracker for anyone who doesn’t know it already. Congratulations on your win!
Pivotal Tracker GoRuCo Haiku Contest!
Friday, May 29, 2009
One day only… We’re giving away one ticket to GoRuCo, the Gotham Ruby Conference happening here in New York tomorrow, Saturday, May 30th.
Rules: Submit your Pivotal Tracker-related Haiku to tracker-haiku-contest@pivotallabs.com by 5pm ET tonight, May 29th.
We’ll pick one winner, at our sole discretion, to be announced here. All submissions are licensed to Pivotal Labs to use however we see fit, and you retain the ability to use them as you see fit, under the Creative Commons commercial attribution share alike license. The winner will be granted one ticket to GoRuCo, to be used tomorrow.
Valid entries must include name, telephone, and email. Name will be used in attribution, but neither the telephone number or email will be made public.
So have at it! Give us your Tracker haikus. Don’t know Tracker yet? Check it out!
MacRuby and HotCocoa
Thursday, May 28, 2009 | Run time: 34:56
MacRuby is an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime under OS X. MacRuby is based on Ruby 1.9 but contains substantial modifications including the merging of object models, using the Objective-C 2.0 generational garbage collector, moving core types atop their Objective-C counterparts and replacement of standard libraries to more optimally integrate with OS X. MacRuby also includes a new library, HotCocoa, a thin, idiomatic Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. This talk introduces MacRuby and HotCocoa and demonstrates how to use them to quickly build OS X desktop applications with Ruby.
Need a Job? Come Work With Pivotal Clients
Thursday, May 28, 2009
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’s a short description of Honk and Mavenlink, two Pivotal Labs clients currently looking for developers. Their full job postings follow at the end of this post.
Mavenlink is a funded startup that is changing the way people find experts who can help them and is providing the necessary tools to get their work done online. We are founded on the principle that virtually everybody needs qualified professional services that are readily accessible, affordable, and there when they need them. We’ve been working with Pivotal Labs to get our product launched, so we’re serious about being agile and we’ve got the right engineering process in place. This is a unique opportunity to join the Mavenlink team and contribute significantly to the direction of the company. We’re looking for someone who is not only passionate about development, but also shares our vision for the tools and capabilities necessary for making remote work better than working in person for both the client and the maven.
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 each company directly. This is an exclusive service provided to our clients, no external companies or recruiters please.
Full job postings follow.
Mavenlink
Mavenlink is a funded startup that is changing the way people find experts who can help them and is providing the necessary tools to get their work done online. We are founded on the principle that virtually everybody needs qualified professional services that are readily accessible, affordable, and there when they need them.
We are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer to join our team. We’ve been working with Pivotal Labs to get our product launched, so we’re serious about being agile and we’ve got the right engineering process in place. This is a unique opportunity to join the Mavenlink team and contribute significantly to the direction of the company. We’re looking for someone who is not only passionate about development, but also shares our vision for the tools and capabilities necessary for making remote work better than working in person for both the client and the maven.
Job Description:
- Developing Mavenlink’s Ruby on Rails application
- Test Driven Development
- Pair Programming
- Aggressive Refactoring
- Using Pivotal Tracker to estimate and knock down stories
- Participating in stand-ups and retrospectives to improve
Mavenlink’s product, process, and culture
Additional Skills desired:
- HTML/CSS
- Javascript & jQuery experience
- Experience with rSpec, Webrat, and other testing frameworks
- Rails application deployment experience
- SQL
Compensation and benefits:
- Competitive salary
- Equity stake
- Full medical and dental
Interested? Send your resume to jobs@mavenlink.com
Honk
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, focusing on what other real people actually think, not product specifications or biased editorial. Our site will be 100% consumer driven with no journalists or former race car drivers telling you what minivan or sedan you should purchase. Instead, users will find real people like yourself 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. Our integration with our core partner is currently underway and our beta launch is scheduled for 5/27. 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:
- Amazon S3/SQS/EC2
- CSS/Javascript/JQuery
- Thin/NGinx/Mongrel
- RSpec/Webrat/Selenium
- CSV and XML data feed integration
Previous experience working in online automotive or social media is desired, but definitely not required. Honk is currently co-located in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Honk headquarters is currently located in West Los Angeles, right on the border of Santa Monica. 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
Standup 05/27/2009: KODA.us launches
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Interesting Things
- Congratulations to the latest Pivotal client to go live! KODA is a new breed of career-building site, using the power of rich media and social networking to make the job search less about checklists and resumes and more about personality, talents, and networking.
Some Web Ops Resources
Monday, May 25, 2009
A laundry list of stuff I’ve come across / been pointed to lately. What are your favorites (i.e. comments, please)?
General
Book: Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle
Book: Release It! by Michael Nygard
Book: The Art of Capacity Planning by John Allspaw
Conference: Velocity 2009 in SJ – it’s only a month away.
Agile Web Operations blog
… don’t miss the post about their Tracker visualization using the Tracker API.
Presentation: Operational Efficiency Hacks by John Allspaw
… plus all of John Allspaw’s presentations
John Allspaw’s blog, “Kitchen Soap – Thoughts on Capactiy Planning and Web Operations”…(excerpt from latest post: “I can’t tell you how ripped I get when people say things like this: ‘cloud computing means getting rid of ops’ “)
WebOps Visualizations Flickr Group
Apis / tools:
Chef. This is step one, or as Allspaw puts it “if there’s only one thing you do, automated configuration and
deployment management should be it”. We run chef-solo in our cap deploy. Don’t miss Cooking with Chef 101.
RRDTool (Ganglia-related)
God for process management.
Xray for ruby process inspection.
Elif is Perl File::ReadBackwards ported to ruby.
Oldies:
Book: Think Unix
Monkey Patch Du Jour
Sunday, May 24, 2009
The following monkey patch gives a bit more information in the ActiveRecord SQL logs. Instead of just saying “User Load” it also says the file and line number in your code that asked AR to perform the operation. That way you can have a hope of tracking it down and optimizing it away if at all possible.
User Load (0.2ms) views/main_page.rb:107:in `filters_box' SELECT * FROM `users`
Code after the jump. I guess you put it in environment.rb with all the other monkeys.
module ActiveRecord
module ConnectionAdapters
class AbstractAdapter
def log_info(sql, name, ms)
if @logger && @logger.debug?
c = caller.detect{|line| line !~ /(activerecord|active_support|__DELEGATION__)/i}
c.gsub!("#{File.expand_path(File.dirname(RAILS_ROOT))}/", '') if defined?(RAILS_ROOT)
name = '%s (%.1fms) %s' % [name || 'SQL', ms, c]
@logger.debug(format_log_entry(name, sql.squeeze(' ')))
end
end
end
end
end
Title: Standup 05/22/2009: RubyMine – CentOS – Symlink Testing – JSON gem – EY Solo
Friday, May 22, 2009
Ask for Help
“I am having trouble installing Mechaize on CentOS any tips and tricks?”
None from the pivots…
“Any good tips on testing the creation of symlinks from ruby?”
shell out and do an ls -l then parse the string to see if it’s target is correct.
Interesting Things
- RubyMine‘s changes -> repository pane only seems to show the current users changes (SVN) instead of all changes for the repository. Showing history of a file still shows all user changes.
- The JSON gem overrides active supports to_json method. So if you are using the built in rails JSON support and you install the gem be aware that there are differences between them.
- Word is this is better on Edge and the gem no longer conflicts with the built-in version
- We have started moving some of our servers to Engine Yards cloud solution, and while it is still in the early stages it is looking like a promising solution.
Title: Standup 05/21/2009: Slow dependent destroy's
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Ask for Help
“I have a dependent destroy that is taking 5sec+, What can I do to speed that up?”
- try dependent delete on the leaves of the chain if you don’t have any after destroy hooks there that need running.
- try cascade delete in your database (again as long as you don’t have any after destroys to worry about)
- try marking the element at the top of the tree as deleted (using acts as paranoid or similar), then run an offline process to look for those records and destroy them and their dependent objects.
- don’t worry about orphaned records and manually clean them up every once in a while (unrecommended but least development effort)