Robby on Rails

We’re not looking for rock stars or ninjas at Planet Argon. ;-)

We’re looking for individuals that share our core values.

• COLLABORATION – We believe that an open dialogue between all members of a group helps to produce more reasoned and intelligent decisions.
• ENTHUSIASM – We recognize the unique power of people who are passionate about their craft. We believe that fun is an essential ingredient in a collaborative and vibrant company culture. We think happy people make better software.
• COMMUNITY – We are part of many communities. Our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplace, and our professional communities. We give back to our communities by implementing socially responsible business practices and sharing our knowledge and tools with our peers.
• VERSATILITY – We believe that it is important for our team to be open and flexible, as well as the work that we do. This allows us to adapt to change and encourage innovation.
• EXECUTION – We value action and when people make things happen. It is important that we follow through on our commitments, plans, and ideas.

..maybe you’re a .NET/Java/PHP/Python developer (who secretly plays with Ruby on Rails at night/weekends). We’re looking for an intermediate-level Rails developer to join our team. Ideal candidates would be in the Portland, Oregon area or willing to relocate.

If you’re interested, take a moment and introduce yourself.

We’re starting a new project and I’m finding myself adding things to the code base that we’ve done in the past… hence the last few posts. As we’re doing this, I’d like to highlight some of the little things that we do on each project to maintain some consistency and in that process reach out to the community for alternative approaches.

I’m intrigued by the vendor everything concept, but we haven’t yet adopted this on any of our projects (yet).

What we have been doing is to maintain a REQUIRED_GEMS file in the root directory of our Rails application.

For example:

$ cat REQUIRED_GEMS

actionmailer
actionpack
actionwebservice
activerecord
activesupport
cgi_multipart_eof_fix
daemons
fastercsv
fastthread
feedtools
gem_plugin
image_science
mongrel
mongrel_cluster
mysql
rails
rake
RedCloth
Ruby-MemCache
soap4r
uuidtools

Everybody on the team (designers/developers) knows to look here to make sure they have everything installed when beginning to work on the application.

This has worked fairly well from project to project but since we’re starting a new project, I’m curious if anybody has some better ways to approach this. Should we look more seriously at the vendor everything approach or are there any alternative approaches?

Our team has slowly been transitioning from IRC to Campfire (iPhone interface helped with this decision) for internal team discussions. Earlier today, I decided to setup Campfire to connect to Growl. There are a few scripts to do this, but I figured that I’d consolidate the steps here for my teammates and share with everyone else in the process.

Step 1: Get stuff installed

You’ll need to install the following programs on OSX.

• Growl (install and run it)
• Fluid.app (run a web site in it’s own desktop app)
  • Follow instructions on their homepage (requires restart of Safari)

Step 2: Setup Campfire

Once you have everything installed, you can go ahead and create your Campfire Fluid application. You’ll need to provide your Campfire URL and a name for the application.

Once you get it running, you should be able to run your Campfire application in it’s own window.

Step 3: Install the Campfire Growl script for GreaseKit

Next, you’ll want to install this script, created by Tim Harper, on userscripts.org within your Campfire Fluid.app instance.

Under the Userscripts menu, you’ll see: Browse Userscripts.org.

Find your way to the script (search for: “Campfire Growl”) to find and install the script.

Once it installs, you’ll then need to activate it in the Fluid applications management interface. Within Campfire application, go to Userscripts > Manage Userscripts.

Then activate it like so:

..and that’s it! When you’re not focused on Campfire… you should see Growl notifications when other people are talking in the active room.

One of the reasons why I’ve been too busy to write on my blog lately is that we recently moved into to a new studio. We had a lot of preparation to do before we moved in and are finally getting settled in the new space.

We took the space from…

To this…

As you can see.. we have lots of natural light for the entire team…

I think that Chris Griffin shares the same excitement that I do about the new space. ;-)

We’ll be posting more photos on the Planet Argon flickr stream over the coming weeks as we get the studio organized. :-)

Okay, this is a little overdue… but better late than never! ;-)

We’ve had several new people start with PLANET ARGON over the past few months. Some of them are blogging about their experience of working with Ruby on Rails and being a part of our team. I wanted to quickly introduce you to a few of them and their blogs, which I hope that you consider subscribing to.

Chris

For quite some time, we’ve been needing more design assistance, so late last year… we hired Chris Griffin, who moved here last year from Florida. He’s our new User Interface Designer and gets to work within the Rails environment everyday with the rest of us. It seems that Brian and Chris worked over the weekend to get his new blog up. Chris is self-proclaimed genius. I suggest that you keep an eye on his blog… because I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty active one. Chris joining our team marks a pivotal point in our teams evolution as we continue to place more emphasis in our Design and Development process on the User Experience.

• http://chriszgriffin.com/

Graeme

Our newest hire is Graeme Nelson, who recently moved to Portland from Seattle. He just joined our Design and Development team and if you’ve been reading the Rails-related blogs, you might have seen his blog already. He’s been blogging a lot about using RSpec with Rails and other fun things. He’s been contracting with us since the start of the year and I’m really excited that he’s accepted a job offer and joined the team!

• http://blog.imperialdune.com/

Gary

Last… but not least is Gary Blessington. I believe that I first offered Gary a job with PLANET ARGON about 2 1/2 years ago when we were still focused on PHP/PostgreSQL…. but PHP apparently wasn’t enough of a catalyst. Gary and I previously worked together at Imark Communications several years ago, when I first started doing web development. He was the senior developer on the team and was an important mentor during my early days of developing in a professional environment. Late last year, he hung up his .NET tool belt to become our Design and Development Director. He started blogging earlier this year and is sharing his experience of switching from .NET to Ruby on Rails.

• http://garyblessington.us/.

I’ll introduce the others as they start blogging and such. :-)

Yesterday, those of us who were still at the PLANET ARGON office (and not already on vacation) took the afternoon off yesterday to have a few drinks to kick-start the holiday season.

I’m getting ready to head up to Seattle for the holiday weekend. I hope that you all have a safe and fun holiday season!