Pivotal Labs has been at the forefront of agile development since it's early days. We've taken what we've learned by applying agile concepts on a countless number of real world projects, and honed these skills into a very effective way to build software. Along the way, we also built a great project management and collaboration tool - Pivotal Tracker.

Not only does Tracker serve as a critical component of our own development process, it's also relied on by thousands of teams out there in the world, from open source developers, to fast growing startups, and high profile, established companies.

It's a great app, yet we have lots of ideas for how we'd like to improve it. Want to help us? If you're a Ruby on Rails developer, enthusiastic about agile development, and want to help us to take Tracker to the next level, read on.

We're currently looking for developers in the Denver/Boulder, Colorado area. Familiarity with Ruby on Rails is important, as are strong Javascript, CSS, and overall web UI skills. At Pivotal Labs, we pair and test drive 100% of the time, so any experience with pair-programming and/or test driven development would be a huge plus. We're also big on aggressive refactoring, so be ready to roll up your sleeves.

If you're interested in working with us, please send your current resume to tracker-jobs@pivotallabs.com, and tell us a little about yourself. Principals only, please.

Next week is the first Wednesday of October, and that means another New York City Ruby Happy Hour, sponsored by Outside.in and Pivotal.

Where: Outside.in, 20 Jay St Suite 1019 (10th Fl), Brooklyn, NY
When: 7-9PM, Wednesday September 3rd
Who: If you’re a developer who uses Ruby and would like to meet some other Ruby folks, toss around ideas, or just have a few beers, we welcome you with open arms!

There will be pizza, beer and wii-based entertainment for everyone. Click here for more details, and to RSVP.

Pivotal Labs is teaming up with Outside.In in New York City to co-host the monthly Ruby Happy Hour, on the first Wednesday of every month, starting Sep 3.

There will be pizza, beer and wii-based entertainment for everyone. Apparently these happy hours are getting quite popular, so please RSVP either in the comments here, or on Outside.In's blog.

Where: Outside.in, 20 Jay St Suite 1019 (10th Fl), Brooklyn, NY
When: 7-9PM, Wednesday September 3rd
Who: If you’re a developer who uses Ruby and would like to meet some other Ruby folks, toss around ideas, or just have a few beers, we welcome you with open arms!

Outside.in (www.outside.in) is the web's leading platform for neighborhood news and conversation. Outside.in's technology dynamically maps web content to offline locations, which enables hyperlocal news discovery and sharing for consumers. The company also recently released GeoToolkit (www.outside.in/toolkit), which provides powerful tools for content creators of all sizes to optimize, promote and monetize their local content. Outside.in is supported by leading investors including Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, Betaworks and the New York City Investment Fund. For more information, visit www.outside.in or the companyís blog at http://blog.outside.in.

Interesting

• The defer method in EventMachine allows you to spawn processes in Ruby, like this (from comment in eventmachine.rb):

  operation = proc {
      # perform a long-running operation here, such as a 
      # database query.
      # as usual, the last expression evaluated in the block will 
      #be the return value.
  }
  callback = proc {|result|
      # do something with result here, such as send it back 
      # to a network client.
  }
  EventMachine.defer( operation, callback )
  

• New art on the wall, check it out.

Help

• Can anyone recommend a good hosted wiki for casual use? Some of the suggestions so far include pbwiki, MediaWiki (perhaps a bit heavy weight for personal use), and Google Pages.

Interesting

• Ian Mcfarland talks to Geoffrey Grosenbach about Pivotal's agile culture in the May 17 episode of the Rails Podcast. Check it our here.
• This Wednesday's brown bag will be a round table discussion about "Tracker and the client: The real vs. the ideal". Lunch provided, as always.
• When something in Rails isn't working as expected, it may just be a bug that's been reported or fixed recently. Is a good idea to check the the Trac tickets at dev.rubyonrails.org.

Help

• Rails rcov seems to get stuck in an infinite loop on Leopard.
• Anyone know a good general practitioner within walking distance of the office?
• Confirm dialogs are tripping up Selenium (8.1) on one of our projects. Something related to focus, perhaps?
• What does Ní Hea mean?