We've launched a Tracker Users Group in San Francisco, and the second meetup is on June 24th at 6:30pm at the Pivotal Labs office on Market St.

This second meetup will include a demo for new users; a rundown of the new features rolled out last night and soon to come; and a discussion of Story Estimation, Point scales, and the philosophy behind how they are used in Tracker.

Click the link below to become a member of the group and RSVP. We hope to see you there!

http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Pivotal-Tracker-Users-Group/calendar/10658822/

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.

This is the second installment of our new weekly posting on Blabs for those of you looking for engineering jobs. We hope you find it useful, and if you're happily employed please ignore this.

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 KODA, Honk, and Mavenlink, three Pivotal Labs clients currently looking for developers. Their full job postings follow at the end of this post.

KODA redefines the job recruiting process for the emerging workforce. Translated from a Native American word meaning friend or ally, KODA is a cooperative meeting place for talented individuals and organizations to come together and communicate in an authentic voice. This transparent platform allows both parties to share identities, discover more about each other and find the best professional opportunities. KODA is a funded start-up that has been developed exclusively by Pivotal Labs over the past year. Prior to our engagement with Pivotal, KODA collaborated with IDEO to develop a top brand and an innovative site infrastructure. KODA is releasing its Beta version this month!

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.

Renowned design firm Cooper hosted a panel discussion at Pivotal Labs where founder Alan Cooper joined other senior members of the firm to discuss the challenges of integrating user interaction design work with the agile development process.

The entire panel discussion is posted to our podcast and the talks page of our website.

Interesting Things

• When using time zones in Rails 2.1, if you specify a zone, any datetime ActiveRecord attributes will be returned in that zone. E.g. if you specify Eastern Time, and then later request changed_at from an ActiveRecord, it will be returned in ET. However, if you ask for Time.now it is always returned in the local time zone, regardless of TZ settings. This isn't necessarily bad or unexpected behavior, but it can lead to test failures if you save a time to an ActiveRecord, get it back, and then compare the values. One workaround is to use Time.zone.now, which will always respect the current time zone, although this doesn't help with large existing codebases.

Ask for Help

"We're FlexMock for some of our Test::Unit unit tests, and recently added some new tests; nothing that is exercising new parts of the code or creating new mocks. However, for some reason when we call previously existing mocks we get errors from Rspec. These are not exceptions or assertion failures, but full-stop errors as if there were a syntax error. Turns out Rspec reopens the Test::Unit::TestCase class and overwrites some behavior, although the cause of the errors remain entirely unclear. Anyone know why it would do that and how to prevent it in the future?"

A few people mumbled about Rspec magic, but actual help was not immediately forthcoming.

Interesting Things

• If you're having problems with JSUnit not loading in Firefox 3, load the about:config settings and search for 'origin'. You'll want to change the security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy value from 'true' to 'false'. JSUnit should now initialize properly, although you still won't see a Browse button.

Ask for Help

"Does anyone know why a Selenium click event might not trigger the same activity as directly triggering the DOM id through javascript? We have a form submit button that works fine when directly activated but doesn't work in Selenium."

It was suggested that perhaps this is a timing issue. Maybe some required JS for the form hasn't loaded before Selenium is trying the event.

One workaround would be to test only the form submission called by on-click instead of the click itself.

Interesting Things

• It's always a good idea to test your backup and recovery strategy, but while doing so one team of Pivots found that restoring MySQL was more painful than they had expected. Restoring the backup to the master database and then replaying the binary logs to the right point but no further took a lot of manual attention and time. Is there a utility to ease the pain of restoring MySQL from backup?

Interesting Things

• If using Desert and Rails 2.1, if the first view loaded is from a plugin things blow up.

Ask for Help

"How can I make follow_redirect go to a URL?"

When using a follow_redirect to a URL instead of a hash, the test fails with a string conversion exception. No solutions were forthcoming.

Interesting Things

• Congratulations to Engine Yard on closing $15M Series B financing!
• After a catastrophic HDD failure, one Pivot found 1password on his iPhone to be invaluable in restoring all his login credentials.