Robby on Rails: Category Business

Review: Braintree

Robby Russell — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:58:00 -0500

Zack Chandler (author of the TrustCommerce gem) writes..

“How do you like Braintree? I’ve haven’t used them yet but may in the future…”

Good question. I was actually planning to write up a quick review of their exceptional service because not many people know about them yet. Now is as good of a time as any.

We’ve been using Authorize.NET for over four years as it’s what our primary banking institution hooked us up with when we began researching merchant services. However, they didn’t provide us with some of the subscription-based management features that we found with some other payment gateways and we began referring our customers to TrustCommerce. We planned to switch over to TrustCommerce with the development of Cobalt (our new billing and hosting support platform).

After we began to set milestones for going live with Cobalt, I tried to get in touch with TrustCommerce. I was provided a demo account and really wanted to get in touch with their sales department to get an application.

...a week goes by. No response. So, I tried to contact them again. No response. tried again… and (yet) again… no response. To date, I have yet to hear back from them.

This was echoed by one of our consulting clients that said, “their support staff seems real responsive, but I can’t get ahold of anyone to actually get an account.” So, I planned to start looking at other options or stick with Authorize.NET.

..and then (as if they were listening to my thoughts)... I receive an email from Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree, a payment processing company.

(snip)

“I am the founder of Braintree, a payment processing company. We provide credit card and electronic check processing, simplified PCI DSS Compliance through remote storage of credit card data, payment gateway/virtual terminal, etc. We’re a one stop shop.”

He goes on to introduce himself and explain that they’re really focused on subscription-based services, which is exactly what our new centralized billing app is handling.

So, since I hadn’t heard from TrustCommerce, I requested a demo with Braintree. We were able to take advantage of the hard work that has put into the ActiveMerchant project, which already works with Braintree. So, our application that we’d been focusing on integrating with TrustCommerce was just a few lines of code away from working with Braintree.

While I’m sure that many people have had great experiences with TrustCommerce (as I did when I worked with their support team while working client projects)... not being able to order an account isn’t doing them any favors.

So, we just launched and now running Cobalt with Braintree as our backend for managing recurring credit card processing. Their customer support has been great so far. In one case, I messed up some security settings and locked myself out and after they saw that I had failed to login a few times, I received a call from one of their support people. I didn’t prompt it… they took the initiative to call me. She said she’d look into it and called me back when she figured out what I had done wrong. :-)

On Monday afternoon, after I announced that we launched Cobalt on my blog, I got a congratulations from another of their developers who congratulated us and wished us the best of success.

So… Zack. To answer your question, “How do you like Braintree?”

My answer is… I think they’re fantastic so far. Their web interface for managing your account could use a few IxD eyes, but we like that it’s minimal and most importantly… the core functions of their product appear to be working great. Our team has now talked to roughly 5-6 different team members at Braintree and have nothing but great things to say about those interactions. Great customer service that definitely seems to echo that they want their customers to be successful and are here to do what they can to provide us with the tools we need to fulfill our goals.

I only wish that we had the same service from all of our vendors.

Bryan, thanks for introducing yourself. You have a great team.

For more information, visit http://getbraintree.com/

Be Careful that you don’t Stub your Big Toe

Boxcar Conductor: Rails deployment made easy

Robby Russell — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:16:00 -0500

In a previous post, I showed how we’ve been working on an interactive deployment process for Rails applications to reduce the time it takes to deploy to a Boxcar.

We began to move our Boxcar deployment recipes into it’s own Rails plugin and just made it available on GitHub.

Introducing Boxcar Conductor

The Boxcar Conductor plugin aims to automate the entire process for deploying to your Boxcar. We’re down to just a few simple commands to run to get your application up and running. While mileage may vary with other hosting providers, we did want to open up this work to the community and centralize our work with the community of Boxcar customers who have helped us build and test these tools.

Install Boxcar Conductor

If you’re running on Edge Rails… you can take advantage of the new support for installing plugins in git repositories.


  $ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/robbyrussell/boxcar-conductor.git

note: If you’re not using edge rails, you can download a tarball and install the plugin manually.

Installing the plugin will add a custom Capfile and config/deploy.rb, which has a few things for you to define based on your Boxcar subscription.

Configure Your Boxcar

Once the plugin is installed, you can run the following task:


  $ cap boxcar:config

This will ask you a few questions about your deployment needs.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Which database server will you be using? (along with db user/pass info)
How many mongrels should run in your cluster?

After a few quick multiple choice answers, you’re application is ready to be deployed and you can run an Boxcar-specific deployment task.


  $ cap deploy

We’ve also created a new public project on Lighthouse so that you can submit tickets and ideas to us. With Boxcar, we’re really aiming to remove as many steps from the deployment process that aren’t necessary.

To follow along, visit the project on lighthouse or GitHub.

If you’re interested in learning more about Rails Boxcar, feel free to drop us a line.

Announcing Cobalt and monthly subscriptions for Boxcar

Robby Russell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:24:00 -0500

We’ve been designing and developing a new centralized billing platform over the past few months and late last week, we launched it! Along with this new billing platform, we launched another new application, Cobalt, which is a new account management and support tool for our hosting customers.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

We’ll be migrating all of our past customers over to this new system in time, but are initially using it for new Boxcar customers.

We’ve been building the new system to use Braintree as our new credit card payment gateway. With this switch, we’re also introducing monthly subscription rates for Boxcar, which means that you can try it out month-to-month now.

Over the next few weeks/months, we’ll be announcing several features to Cobalt that will ease your Rails deployment experience.

I want to thank all those on my team that helped get these new applications up and running.

If you’re looking for professional VPS-based Rails hosting, hop on our train by ordering a Boxcar today for $99/month!

For more information, visit railsboxcar.com or Planet Argon.

Also, be sure to follow Boxcar on twitter.

Portland is calling... (you)

Robby Russell — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:30:00 -0500

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.

Rails Business: Year Review for 2007

Robby Russell — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:54:00 -0600

Happy Holidays!

Wow, 2007 has gone by really fast. I’ve been fairly busy wrapping up projects and getting ready to start new ones at Planet Argon. I’m sure that when many of you start a new project… you look back at what you’ve learned from previous ones. Even throughout iterations in a project, we try our best to have retrospectives to be sure that we’re all learning from what has and hasn’t worked. A few weeks ago, I decided to drop a note to the members of the Business of Rails community to ask people to share some of their lessons from the year. My goal was to get people to share their experiences from over the year with other members of the community and see where the dialogue takes us into 2008.

As expected… I got some great responses, which I encourage you to read for yourself. You might even participate in the conversation(s) and share your experiences. We’d love to hear them.

Side note… I’d like to thank all of you who have participated in the Business of Rails community over the year. It was an idea that came to me during RailsConf 2007 after I participated on a panel with other business leaders in the Ruby on Rails community. We now have over 800 members on the mailing list! I’ve learned a lot from the community and hope more of you decide to join. :-)

Embracing Chaos, part 1

Robby Russell — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:21:00 -0600

Consider this part one of several posts on my thoughts of the art of embracing chaos.

Don’t let the books fool you. The construction of custom software is an unmastered and volatile cesspool of chaos. I don’t adhere to the belief that there is a perfect methodology or process that will work for every project… as I’m sure many of you don’t.

Unlike bowling, you’ll never achieve a perfect score. Even in bowling, It’s unlikely that anybody will learn how to bowl a perfect score and do so on every game for the rest of their career.

You’ll never meet every expectation that a client has on every project.

You’ll never meet every expectation that a user has when they interact with your application.

Expectations are an interesting thing.

Your project might get widely adopted and embraced, but you’re still trying to control chaos.

It’s chaos. Pure chaos¹.

So, why do we bother? Why do we try so hard when the odds aren’t in our favor?

To be continued…

¹ Chaos Theory, Wikipedia

Moved to our new studio

Robby Russell — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:56:00 -0600

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. :-)

PLANET ARGON is seeking fresh talent... could it be you?

Robby Russell — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:10:00 -0500

My blog has been fairly quiet lately because our team has been busy helping push a few big client projects out the door. We’ll be posting announcements about those launches on the PLANET ARGON Blog soon, so stay-tuned there!

We’ve been growing the design-side of our team lately, but we’re also still seeking some more Rails-talent in Portland, OR. If you’re in Portland or interested in moving here¹, you should introduce yourself to our team. We’re looking for people to work on-site in Portland, so any remote candidates will be turned away… we’re moving into a shiny and new office space in downtown and are looking for another developer to join our Design and Development team.

you’ll fit in really well if you’re into outdoor activities… ;-)

We’re seeking mid-level Ruby on Rails developers that can pick things up quickly. Having some experience with RSpec will go along way with us. Ideal candidates would have great communication skills and be able to work in a fast-paced environment that places a huge emphasis on collaboration between designers and developers (let’s not forget to mention our clients). Bring what you already know and learn the rest with us.

While everyone might have Wii’s in the office, we’ve taken it to the next level with Speed Stacking! :-p

To apply, send an email to af22+8509@c1.catchthebest.com,

Side note: We’re giving Catch the Best a whirl to review job candidates. If you’re hiring people, you might consider giving it a try.

¹ Everybody is moving to Portland… ;-)

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #4

Robby Russell — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:59:00 -0500

As I mentioned in my last review, I wouldn’t be updating on a weekly basis, which is a shame because there are so many fascinating discussions going on that might benefit you if you’re running a business that uses and/or relies on the Ruby on Rails framework. I’d like to highlight some of the discussions that have been taking place over the past month or so.

First off… wow! As of this morning, there are 650 members!

Some Recent Discussions

Obtaining Ruby Gigs

Johan Pretorius started a discussion with the following…

“I’ve been lurking on the group for a while now, the time has come to participate … What strategy would you recommend for somebody that wants to break into the Ruby (on Rails) market?”

On a related topic, Jose Hurtado started a discussion asking for tips on how to get a reputation in the Ruby on Rails community for you business.

Some of the responses included:

Start a portfolio
Contribute to Open Source projects
Contribute to Rails through Documentation
Subcontract through well-known developers
Start a blog
Write a book

Read the entire thread and please share any other ideas that you have on this topic with Johan, Jose, and rest of the list. :-)

Taking a full-time job, what about your freelance clients?

Oren writes, “I got a full-time job offer as employee (and not on as a contractor). My current client might need some help on the weekends in the next month, so I might still do contract work. Can I keep my corporation (corp S) while working full time?”

Read the responses

Reality Check!

Starting your own business might sound like an amazing thing to do, but it often comes with a lot of consequences and struggles, which I’m definitely not been immune to.

Michael M. writes, ”...added to having to create a company, perform customer support, continue to grow the features, marketing, and the loads of other things I haven’t thought of yet…is there any hope that one person can pull this off while still working at my current job ( with hopes of going it alone when I’m sure it can fly ), and giving time to my family, with very little up front costs. I’ve been reading quite a bit about bootstrapping lately, but to really make the time has been very difficult.”

There were several thoughtful responses where well-known members of the Ruby on Rails community, such as Joe O’Brien Ben Curtis shared through personal experiences.

Joe O’Brien wrote, “I wanted to mainly chime in on the family part. Something that has taken a year for me to figure out how to balance. I would not have been able to do any of it, had it not been for my wife’s full support. I have three kids, all of whom I love spending time with, so figuring out a way to balance it all has been very tricky. Up front though, my wife and I knew this would not be your typical job. It helped that I used to travel and now do not, but it has still been an adjustment.”

If you’ve been running your own Rails business, please consider responding to this thread and sharing your experience.

Join the Community

As mentioned, this is just a small sample of some of the great discussions taking place on the Rails Business mailing list. If you’re an aspiring Rails freelancer or business owner, be sure to join the community and share your experiences and learn from other members of the community that are willing to share theirs.

As always, have fun!

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #3

Robby Russell — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 10:37:00 -0500

It’s been about six weeks since the last Rails Business “Weekly” Review on here, so perhaps it’s worth changing the name to cut me some slack on not being consistent. ;-)

Since the last post, we’ve gone from around 400 members to 555 as of this morning. We’ve had 562 messages as well, so there hasn’t been a shortage of discussions taking place. I’d like to take a few moments to highlight some of the discussions that have taken place and encourage you all to consider participating, if you’re not already.

Licensing and Client Agreements

Tim Case writes,

“My client sent me this agreement drawn up from their lawyer that included the following:

(c) the Contractor shall not bundle with or incorporate into any Work Product any third-party products, ideas, processes, software, codes, data, techniques, names, images, or other items or properties without the express, written prior approval of the Company;”

Tim then goes on to ask how his applies to using Ruby on Rails, which as a MIT license and how other consultancies are handling these types of situations. Follow the discussion…

Escrow

Gustin writes, “Does anyone have any escrow experience, legal and cost? I am dealing with a client that got burned bad and we are reducing their fear with escrow on the first two iterations.”

Follow the discussion…

Project Planning tools

Mike Pence writes, “So, I used to use MS Project for the composition of those dreaded Gantt charts, but it has been a few years since I had to be so formal. Anything new and exciting – and more robust than Basecamp – happening in the world of project planning software?”

Follow the discussion…

Not long after, Jim Mulholland started a new thread on the same topic and brought up the open source application, redMine. Follow this discussion…

Ruby on Rails versus .NET

Michael Breen asked a big question on the list, which has sparked an going discussion about the benefits of using Rails versus .NET (and other platforms).

“A couple of months ago I decided to stop actively pursuing .NET gigs to focus on Rails. Several of my existing .NET clients have learned of this through the grapevine and have contacted me to discuss.”

Follow the discussion…

Three things Tim’s learned from Freelancing Rails

Tim Case shared his experience of freelancing with Ruby on Rails and highlights three things that he’s learned.

The non-code business aspect of Freelancing is demanding.
It takes 10 hours to bill 6 to 8.
Figuring out your rate is hard.

Read the rest of Tim’s observations and the discussion the followed.

Client issue tracking and documentation

Jeff Judge writes, “Hello all! I was curious to here how people are handling client issue tracking and documentation.”

Several applications were mentioned for handling issue tracking and the general consensus was that there was still a lot to be desired that current options didn’t provide. Be sure to follow the discussions…

Join the Community

These were just a small handfull of the discussions that have taken place over the past several weeks. If you’re an aspiring Rails freelancer or business owner, be sure to join the community and share your experiences and learn from other members of the community that are willing to share theirs.

Until next time, have fun!

Rails Code Audit Tips - Filtered Parameter Logging

Robby Russell — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:50:00 -0500

It’s been a month since I posted, Audit Your Rails Development Team and now I find myself sitting in a hotel room in Mankato, Minnesota with Graeme after a long day of walking through the documents that we delivered to our client after conducting a Rails Code Audit and Review. Our client felt that it would be a great idea to have us visit with six of their employees and walk through the various topics that we brought up in our process. We’ve been doing several of these audits recently and are thought that it would be a good idea to begin sharing some problems that we’ve discovered across projects.

As much as we like to find lots things that we’d recommend improving in Rails applications, we also want to make sure that as many projects as possible avoid some of these common oversights. So, expect to see more posts related to things that we find through our Code Audit and Review process.

Today, I’d like to point out a potential security problem that is often overlooked by developers and system administrators.

Log files.

Does your application request any of the following information from your users?

Social security number
Credit card date (number, expiration date, etc..)
Passwords

BY DEFAULT, all of this data is being written to your production log file. Even if you’re encrypting this data in your database, request parameters (get/post) are all written to your production logs without any encryption. Log files are also notorious for having insecure file permissions, so if you’re on a shared host, other accounts on the server might be able to view them. Regardless of how secure you think your server is, this isn’t data that you want sitting around.

Lucky for you, Ruby on Rails has an easy solution to this problem! All that you need to do is use the filter_parameter_logging method in your controller(s). We generally add something like the following to our application controller.


  filter_parameter_logging :social_security_number, :password, :credit_card_number, 'some-other-param'

This will replace the value from the parameters with [FILTERED], which solves this problem rather nicely.

So, it would be our recommendation, that if your application is storing any sensitive data, that you take advantage of this simple solution. Be sure to read more about filter_parameter_logging before you implement this for various usage examples.

Stay tuned for more tips and tricks. If you’re interested in contracting us for our Rails Code Audit and Review service, give us a call.

Tomorrow, Graeme and I will be meeting for another day with our clients and then we fly home to Portland, Oregon in the evening. We survived our first tornado warnings, which was exciting as we don’t get those on the west coast. ;-)

Rails Code Audits and Reviews, continued

Robby Russell — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:47:00 -0500

In response to my article, Audit Your Rails Development Team, Tim Case writes,

“I think what you are doing has value and I’ve been anticipating that someone in the rails community would step up and do this, hence the question I posed because I’ve thought about that thorny issue too. I have a feeling Planet Argon is making the first step in a direction that has been building, Peer review has the potential to be positive for the entire community, provided that it’s shepherded properly and with care.”

It’s been just over a year since we first made a public announcement of our Rails Code Audit and Review service and we’ve had different types of clients inquire about it. We make sure to call it a code audit and review because we’re not aiming to only point out flaws. We see our service as a way to help stake holders gauge the capabilities of their developers while also providing developers with some more insight to how things could be done differently. There are a lot of developers using Ruby on Rails now and it’s safe to say that there are many that aren’t very good yet. Some may argue that the ease of getting started with Rails makes it easy for inexperienced developers to stay just good enough and never take the next step. We’ve seen some beautiful code and we’ve seen some horrific code. Some of our clients have made the tough decision to fire their existing freelancers after we’ve completed our analysis… but we’ve seen several situations where our clients were happier with their developers after.

For example, we recently completed a code audit and review for a client, which came to us with some concerns about their development team. Things seemed to be going slower than they thought it would and really wanted to have an outside opinion about the quality of their work. Overall, their application was being developed really well and the biggest problems that they had were related to a lack of testing. So, we’re now walking them through the process of integrating RSpec into their development process. Their development team admitted that they suffered from a lack of testing, but were very honest about the fact that they just didn’t know where to begin as it wasn’t something they had time to learn before. We’ve been able to provide them with some direction and now we’re available to answer questions and review their work from time to time. The outcome was good for everyone. The developers are better off because their manager has more confidence in them. The manager has more confidence in the product as a whole and knows exactly where his team should focus their attention on next. We’ve gained a new Rails consulting client and get to help them with their cool project.

While we love working on entire projects from start to finish, we also love working with other developers and development teams. This has been one of our favorite types of client relationships. We’re currently working with a handful of people as they work their way through the project life cycle and we’re always a phone call, Basecamp message, or email away from assisting them. I feel that these types of services are important to the Rails community, because we’ve witnessed situations where clients were unhappy with Rails because they weren’t happy with their developers. We’ve seen people drop Rails in favor of something else because of the poor quality of code that was being written in Rails. When bad perceptions spread, it’s bad for the community as a whole.

What we can do, is become the backup team for the client and/or development team. Should they run into any weird deployment issues at 2am on a Sunday morning or aren’t able to track down the cause of some performance issue, we’re another set of people that can help out. While we don’t know every nook and cranny of our consulting clients’ applications, we do have a good understanding of them. This allows us to dive in and help more quickly than we can for clients that call us for the first time a few hours after they had an emergency.

It’s my opinion that these types of services are very valuable and highly encourage other consultancies in the Rails community to offer them.

If you’re part of a development team and/or a freelance developer and looking for this sort of relationship, please contact us to see how we can assist you.

Rails Business: Weekly Review #2

Robby Russell — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 01:26:00 -0500

First of all, I’d like to welcome the more than fifty people that have joined the Rails Business group since my last post. Over the past week, there were less posts, but we did cover a few important topics, which may be of interest to you.

Subcontracting

Michael Breen asked a few questions about subcontracting for larger firms and how people set their rates when doing this. Several of the responses provided some personal experiences (good and bad) of being a subcontractor on large projects. Where some risks are and how to negotiate your rates, when applicable.

Read the discussion

Change Requests

Nick Coyne started a discussion on how to manage change requests in an Agile development process.

Dealing with large clients

There was also a discussion about how to go about responding to a 150 page RFP for a large client. A few of us offered our experiences of bidding on large projects. Read more

Join the Community

The list is about to pass 400 members and it’s already proving to be a valuable resource for all of you entrepreneurs out there. I encourage you all to introduce yourself.

For more info: http://groups.google.com/group/rails-business

Audit Your Rails Development Team

Robby Russell — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:05:00 -0500

Several months ago, a few of your colleagues decided to join forces with you as you had come up with a concept for an innovative web application, shared the ideas with your friends and relatives, and began developing a business plan. After a few months of performing some initial market research, working on your pitch, and raising some initial funding, you decided to bootstrap the project and start designing and developing the product.

During your research phase, you came across several articles about this exciting new technology called, Ruby on Rails. You were impressed with many of the sites that were being developed on this new framework as well as the community that surrounded it. Your team decided that it would be a great idea to follow this trend and use Rails as the platform for your new product.

At this point, you began soliciting freelance developers and/or firms to hire for the design and implementation of your project. Eventually, you make a decision and break ground on building the product.

Let’s jump forward to the present day.

You’ve been in heavy development for quite some time. Your product has gone through a series of design changes and you’ve recently begun to allow other people to begin testing the application. You’re receiving a lot of bug reports as people use the system. Your development team quickly fixes them as they appear, but you’re noticing a trend in the development process.

The speed of implementing new features is drastically slowing down as your development team is spending most of their time fixing bugs. Along with that, they are becoming frustrated by the project because they can’t keep up with your new feature requests while trying to keep up with your growing number of bug reports. You’re becoming concerned about the stability of the product and are slightly suspicious that your developer(s) might not be as good as they suggested they were.

Did you hire a bad development team? Chances are, you may not be able to tell. You’re not a developer, so reviewing their code would almost be a waste of time. How would you know if they were doing a good or bad job? Your developers reassure you that things are going to work out in the end, but it’s going to take longer then originally planned. Along with this, your partners and investors are anxiously waiting for you to launch the product, but something feels wrong. You’re worried that launching it too soon could be the quick death of the entire project if it all comes to a screeching halt due to unforeseen bugs and problems with the application. This wasn’t how you pictured the launch of your exciting new product and you feel a lack of confidence in the entire process.

What can you do?

Before I get into that, let’s discuss some of the possible causes for this situation.

Your development team may have grossly underestimated this project.
You might have pushed too many features into the initial release of the product and your development team might not have done a good job of helping you determine what you need, not just what you want.
Your development team might not emphasize testing enough in their process.
Your development team may have begun to take a lot of short cuts in an effort to hit your launch date(s)
Perhaps you asked for quick turnarounds on new features before an investor meeting… maybe this happened on several occasions.
Your development team might not be very good with Ruby on Rails, maybe this was their first Rails project.
...and so on.

At this point, the big question is… what’s the problem?

Can you answer this question yourself? Can your development team answer it? If not, what do you do? How can you get an accurate understanding of how stable the code base of your application is?

Answer: An independent code audit and review

Why is this a good idea? Well, when you have an independent team review your code, you get the benefit of having a fresh perspective.. and often times, an independent team can be much more critical and provide an honest assessment in a very short period of time. This is especially true if they have a lot of experience with the technology. For example, PLANET ARGON has been conducting code audits on existing projects for over two years. We’ve designed a process for checking existing code bases for mistakes that we’ve either made ourselves in the past or found in other projects that we’ve reviewed.

In fact, our process currently walks us through the following areas of your Rails application.

Security of the application
Privacy of users’ personal data
Adherence to the conventions of the Ruby on Rails framework
Scalability of the application
Performance of the application and data model
Testing framework and process
User interaction (when applicable)
Information Architecture
Model-View-Controller (MVC) implementation and organization

Not only does this process provide you with our analysis, but we also provide you with our advice as to where your development team should focus their attention next. If your team is lacking experience in the areas that we recommend they focus on, we’re also here to help them through this with our consulting services. We’re currently assisting several Rails development teams with their testing process, refactoring, user interaction design, optimizing their site, improving their deployment strategy, and plan the implementation of new features.

In general, most freelancers and firms could/should provide you this service, but it should not be performed by your existing development team. They have a bias towards their process and this is your chance to get a second (or third) opinion on the work that you’ve been paying them for. If you’re spending several tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars into this product, an independent review of your investment should be something to seriously consider.

There are several different scenarios that could lead you to deciding to have an independent firm perform a code audit. In fact, I’d encourage you to always get an outside perspective of your team’s work.

To learn more about the Code Audit and Review process that we provide, call us at +1 877 55 ARGON or contact us online.

Rails Business: Weekly Review #1

Robby Russell — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 17:07:00 -0500

This past week (give or take a few days), the Rails Business group has covered a lot of topics, that might be of interest to you, should you be running a business and using Ruby on Rails. Many of the members of the new group are independent contractors and have been very open in sharing their experiences of working for themselves. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few conversations and tips that were covered this past week.

Health Coverage

Mike Pence started a conversation about health coverage…

“Has anyone else found the medical insurance issue to be a show stopper for them? Are you one doctor visit and diagnosis away from financial ruin? I can tell you firsthand that wishful thinking won’t pay those bills…”

This started a discussion about how people are able to work on their own and maintain health coverage, which is definitely not something that should be considered lightly. Read more…

Client Expenses

Another great question was raised by Mike Breen.

“I’m going to start work on my first project that will require me to travel. How should I handle the expenses? Do I build the costs into the contract price or do I submit the expenses to the client for reimbursements? Or does this vary from client to client based on the company policy?”

The responses included links to IRS sites and sections of other peoples’ contracts. Read more...

Hosting Client Repositories

Where do you host your client’s source code repositories? Are you managing it all yourself on your own servers or using a service?

The discussion (so far) has lead us to evaluate our own solution for this at PLANET ARGON. It appears that everyone has different concerns about how they want to manage client code during the development cycle.

For example, do you allow your client access to trunk/ if they aren’t all paid up yet?

Also, it seems like there are a bunch of new commercial options coming out (and are built on Rails). Read more...

Naming Your Business

Jared Haworth writes,

“For those of you who are working as ‘independent developers,’ have you found that it makes more sense to simply do business under your own name, for example “Jared Haworth L.L.C.,” or to come up with a clever business name instead, such as “Code Fusion Studios”?”

This was a good conversation to follow and definitely raised a lot of great questions and things to consider in response to the original message. Read more...

AT&T Online Support could use some QA

Robby Russell — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 01:15:00 -0500

So, I was trying to send AT&T wireless a support email through their online system and got stuck at the following screen.

Come on guys… you can design a better form than this… and I’m now going to have to try and sneak in a question under a sub-topic that doesn’t apply to my question… just so I can send you an email?

Getting help shouldn’t be so hard¹.

¹ At least I can Print this page and show all my friends…

Ruby on Rails gets down to business

Robby Russell — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:53:00 -0500

It’s been a week since I announced the new Ruby on Rails meets the business world group. Already, the group attracted over 300 members from around the globe... from Argentina, Boston, Australia, Florida, Seattle, Portland!, the Netherlands, and South Africa.

We’ve already seen some great topics come up… from:

Project estimates
Fixed bids versus time and materials
Pricing
Handling code ownership with client contracts
Incorporating (LLC, S CORP?)
Managing money/accounting
Contracts

I expect that many of these topics will resurface and there has been a lot of valuable information passed around. It’s exciting to see that so many people not only want to use Ruby on Rails as a platform of choice for their business ventures, but they’re also willing to share their personal experiences and knowledge to help others move into this space.

If you’re running a business that focuses on Ruby on Rails or just considering it, you should stop by and introduce yourself.

update: membership grew from 200 to over 300 in the past day!

Hug Your Designer Day, part 2

Robby Russell — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:04:00 -0500

In an effort to increase awareness of the importance of good Interaction and Interface Design in Web Development… I suggested that today be... Hug Your Designer Day.

Designers Versus Developers

Are you seeing a lot of this in your Design and Development teams?

Allison Beckwith, Experience Director and Graeme Nelson, Lead Architect

Happy Designers and Happy Developers

Well, maybe it’s time that your developers gave your designers a hug…

Alain Bloch, Web Developer and Chris Griffin, User Interface Designer

Also… to celebrate Hug Your Designer Day, Amy Hoy was kind enough to post her slides and some audio that I recorded of her talk at RailsConf 07.

Let’s all take a moment to thank the designers who put the experience of the users first. The success of our projects rely on everyone working together. Hug Your Designer! (they might hug back…)

Ruby on Rails meets the Business World

Robby Russell — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:36:00 -0500

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of being up in front of several hundred people with the following individuals on the the Business of Rails panel at RailsConf.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

Moderated by:

Nathaniel Talbott, President, Terralien, Inc.

The Victims:

Justin Gehtland, Founding Partner, Relevance
Geoffrey Grosenbach, Topfunky
Andre Lewis, Earthcode Studios
Joe O’Brien, artisan, EdgeCase, LLC
Robby Russell, Director, PLANET ARGON

Overall, the experience was fantastic. I really enjoyed the questions that Nathaniel and the audience threw our direction, both during and after the session. Throughout the remainder of the conference, people would catch me and present complicated business questions to me and ask for my input. I think that I even helped one guy make his final decision about which job offer he was going to accept (btw, did you decide yet?). It’s always great to share my experiences of leaving my last full-time job (3+ years ago), moving to Rails exclusively (2+ years ago), how Allison and I went from two people in an attic to seven people in an attic in about a month... to having an office in downtown Portland and clients around the globe. I’m also always happy to share my not-so-happy experiences throughout the past few years as well. Running a business is hard stuff as it comes with a whole lot of responsibility, which can lead to stress. It was great to know that the rest of the panel has had their difficult experiences. While Rails makes everything feel easy… running a business is a whole different spectrum of challenges. ;-)

At one point during the session the audience was asked, “How many of you are considering starting your own business based on Ruby on Rails?”

The response?

Based off of my extremely scientific calculations (looking around the room), I’d estimate that around 30-40% of the audience raised their hands! Wow. It was fantastic to see that there was that much interest in people starting venturing off onto their own. Imagine… a flood of new companies, competing directly with us… and guess what? I think that’s awesome! Awesome for Rails. Awesome for future startups. Awesome for everyone!

Let’s face it. Rails isn’t going anywhere for a long time.

So, now that the conference is over, questions have begun to appear in my email box. Thank you all for writing. What if you could have a sounding board to throw questions to on a regular basis? Unfortunately, our session only lasted a hour at RailsConf and too many questions weren’t gotten to. Well, I’ve asked the rest of those on the Business of Rails panel to join me on a google group, titled, Ruby on Rails meets the Business World.

If you’re looking to (A) start your own Rails-based business, (B) already run your own Rails-based business, or ((C)) have business experience that you’d like to share with those in camp A and B… then join the community and start some conversations.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to learning from you all and hope that my experience of co-founding and leading PLANET ARGON can be of benefit to all of you.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

Where is Robby?

Robby Russell — Wed, 09 May 2007 09:09:00 -0500

Just a quick note to those who are waiting to hear back from me about meeting up during/around RailsConf... I’m finally catching up on some of the work that got set back when I recently got sick. If you’re interested in meeting up during/around RailsConf and haven’t already written, you can email me.

There are a few other updates that were mentioned here... one of which is that I’m in the process of drafting a series of articles about the business case for rails, which will correspond with my talk at Ostrava on Rails.

In other news, our team is wrapping up a few big design and development projects and are accepting new project inquiries again for future work. Feel free to contact us to discuss your project with our talented team.

Introducing Boxcar... coming soon to a train station near you!

Robby Russell — Tue, 08 May 2007 15:35:00 -0500

As I just announced on the PLANET ARGON blog... our new hosting solution is almost here!

Last month, we put a freeze on new orders on several of our Rails hosting packages so that we could do some remodeling. Well, we’re almost done and excited about what we’re going to be reopening with. :-)

We’ll be posting updates on the PLANET ARGON blog over the coming days/weeks… so yo might consider subscribing to our feed.

Be sure to sign up on our mailing list to be amongst the first to be notified when Boxcar gets launched!

Speaking at Ostrava on Rails

Robby Russell — Wed, 02 May 2007 09:04:00 -0500

I have been invited to speak at Ostrava on Rails in the Czech Republic this June. I hear that Jamis Buck and Geoffrey Grosenbach will also be speaking at this event. Once a few minor details are set, I’ll post more information about the talk that I am giving, which will related to the Business of Rails panel, which is where you see me speak in just a few weeks at RailsConf 2007 (Portland, OR).

If you’re going to be at the conference in Ostrava, let me know. I’m thinking that I’ll also try to visit Prague before or after the event… as I’ve seen and heard great things about both cities. I believe my lodging in Ostrava will be decided by the powers that be… but if you have any pointers as to where to stay while in Prague, let me know. :-)

Embracing Failure, part 1

Robby Russell — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:38:00 -0500

I’m currently reading To Engineer is Human, by Henry Petroski and found the following applicable to software development and managing client and customer expectations.

“As much as it is human to make mistakes, it is also human to want to avoid them. Murphy’s Law, holding that anything that can go wrong will, is not a law of nature but a joke. All the light bulbs that last until we tire of the lamp, all the shoelaces that outlast their shoes, all the automobiles that give trouble-free service until they are traded in have the last laugh on Murphy. Just as he will not outlive his law, so nothing manufactured can be or is expected to last forever. Once we recognize this elementary fact, the possibility of a machine or a building being as near to perfect for its designed lifetime as its creators may strive to be for theirs is not only a realistic goal but also a reasonable expectation for consumers. It is only when we set ourselves such an unrealistic goal as buying a shoelace that will never break, inventing a perpetual motion machine, or building a vehicle that will never break down that we appear to be fools and not rational beings.”

I’m sure that most of us are guilty of having high expectations for products that we purchased. (why does my ipod screen scratch so easily when in my pocket?) We also set high expectations for the code that we develop, which is why we (hopefully) continue to refine our process. We’re bound to time and budget constraints, which often prevent us from testing every imaginable edge case. Given our constraints, problems are almost always going to arise. It’s no wonder that we see Test-Driven Development as an important part of a healthy development process. We want to catch our failures as early as possible.

Our clients often have high expectations and it’s almost always very reasonable. That’s not to say that some clients will not have highly irrational expectations. It’s our job to manage these expectations as best as possible.

Do we mislead our clients by convincing them that our TDD/BDD process is going to prevent any bugs from creeping from the woodwork after the development cycle is finished?

“I thought that we paid you to fully test the code?”

Really… is that even possible? Can we predict (and test) every possible interaction within an application? Highly unlikely.

What we can do is plan for and embrace failure. We can help our clients understand that almost every application needs to be maintained after it’s initial development cycle. Bugs are inevitable and there needs to be a clear process for handling them.

Perhaps I’m abusing the bug fixing process by calling it a failure… but I’ve also found that yes… many bugs are due to failure. Whether that be a failure to specify application behavior, a failure to understand the project goals, a failure in communication, ...or maybe a failure in our software architecture. We’re constantly failing.. and it’s okay!

IT’S OKAY TO FAIL! (some of the time…)

“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art. Contrary to their popular characterization as intellectual conservatives, engineers are really among the avant-garde. They are constantly seeking to employ new concepts to reduce the weigh and thus the cost of their structures, and they are constantly striving to do more with less so the resulting structure represents an efficient use of materials. The engineer always believes he is trying something without error, but the truth of the matter is that each new structure can be a new trial. In the meantime the layman, whose spokesman is often a poet or writer, can be threatened by both the failures and the successes. Such is the nature not only of science and engineering, but of all human endeavors.”

As we’re creating these virtual structures… are we really taking the time to reflect on our failures? This is why some teams adopt practices like iteration retrospectives and post-mortems.

I’ll end this with a few questions, which I hope that you’ll share your experiences about…

In what ways is your team embracing the failures of your development projects?
How do you help manage your clients expectations… so that they too can plan for and embrace failure? Isn’t their new business venture on the web… likely to experience some failure?

We have so much to learn…

Review: Highrise, part 2

Robby Russell — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:53:00 -0500

It’s been five days since I posted my initial review of Highrise, that shiny new application by our friends at 37signals. I’ve been getting adjusted to my new process of managing contacts and have had to remind myself a few times that there is a brand new tool that aims to make my life a little easier.

Contact Form Integration

I haven’t heard about a Highrise API available yet, but I will definitely be looking into tighter integration once that is available.

Direct Submissions (not yet)

It seems that Highrise isn’t going to allow direct emails to be sent to it, they need to come from an existing contact in your account. For example, our contact form sends an email to our customer service mailing list. At one point, we had it connected to the Basecamp API to submit each new contact request as a new message in a designated project, but it didn’t really give me what I was looking for. Since each user in Highrise has a custom dropbox email address, I thought that I would try to link up the contact form to submit directly to Highrise.

I got the following response back from Highrise. ;-)

Hi Robby- An email was sent to your Highrise dropbox from john@cusackforpresident.com. This address does not correspond to any address that you have recorded for yourself in your Highrise account, and so the email was discarded.

So, in the meantime, I’m following this process with new contact requests as well as the other people at PA who are responsible for responding to Contact Requests.

Contact Request Submission

So… let’s say that John Cusack (one of my favorite actors while growing up) is having a weird dream and wants to get a website built for the record store that he ran in High Fidelity.

He fills out the form and submits it, which our application than stores and also sends over his contact information to our customer service email address.

A few minutes later…

Manually Review in Mail.app (and apply 2-minute rule)

Here I am in Mail.app and doing a double-take… “is that the real John Cusack?” (no, it’s just test data).

I then ask myself the following questions…

Can I answer this in less than 2 minutes?
- If yes, respond immediately (forward to Highrise, if contact info will be needed again)
- If no, forward to Highrise

Okay, so I’ve decided to forward this contact to Highrise as I decided to go ahead and speak with John over the phone, since he was kind enough to leave his phone number.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m using Act-On for forwarding emails to Highrise.

(back-tic h)

...and off the email goes.

View/Edit message/contact in Highrise

I’m now logged into Highrise and looking at my dashboard. As you can see, John Cusack is now at the top of my dashboad and waiting for me to decide if I want to do something with it.

Schedule Follow Up tasks

As I mentioned, I spoke with John over the phone and promised him that I’d send him a follow up email with a proposed date/time for a meeting next week.

...and that’s one way that I’m now using Highrise to getting all my contacts organized.

Five Day Review

Well, after five days of using Highrise, I’m still impressed with it. Our Administrative Assistant began using it last Friday and is using it to schedule follow up tasks for me. This definitely beats the old process of leaving post-it notes on my desk with names and phone numbers. :-)

We also upgraded to a paying account and paid for invoice #4.... and I plan to hit contact #200 later today within our account.

A few bugs:

Forwarding email from Thunderbird doesn’t currently work (as of last Friday)
A few forwarded emails from Mail.app didn’t work right (garbled… html emails perhaps?)

Also… it appears that 37signals has opened the doors to the public earlier today.

Have fun!

Review: Highrise, part 1

Robby Russell — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:45:00 -0500

So, today I got what I’ll call a platinum ticket from one of our pals at 37signals for their upcoming new application, Highrise, which is what they’d call a “shared contact manager.” The rest of you can keep hoping that you’ll win a golden ticket this weekend. ;-)

For the past year and a half, I’ve been wanting to build some sort of contact and task management tool for organizing all of the contact requests that PLANET ARGON receives about our Design and Development and Rails Hosting services. If I go away for a week, I come back to a huge backlog of people who may be waiting a response from me. Having a tool to allow others at PA to see what is in my queue and in some cases, respond on my behalf… has been needed. When I first heard about Highrise long ago, I got excited and have tried several different tools and each of those tools has left me feeling uneasy. Perhaps I’ll post some reviews of the other tools one day.

First Impressions

The signup process looks familiar… :-)

Look and Feel

Well, it definitely looks and feels like a 37signals application. There might have been a time when I thought that would be silly… but really, when you look at other product suites, consistency is extremely important to the user experience. While they are definitely going to attract people to Highrise who have never used any of their other products, I’d also expect a huge majority of their initial customers will be users of their other products. It’s obvious that Highrise was in response to a void in the market that people (likely customers) were asking for in other products like Basecamp.

Highrise has all the Ajaxy goodness that you’d expect in a brand new modern web application. Most of it seems very intuitive, but I found myself getting caught up on the extra tabs across the top of the screen. When new tabs appear, my natural response was to try to close them when I was finished looking at the page. Perhaps this is just a design decision that I’ll learn to really like. At the moment, I’m still not quite sure because I expect the tabs to change quite frequently.

(few minutes later)

Actually… I wonder if the interface designers at 37signals did this to help their users avoid having several tabs open in their web browser. I use Safari for Basecamp and generally have 5-8 tabs open throughout the day for different projects that our team is working on because the Dashboard view doesn’t really give me a good feel for what is happening throughout the day on our various internal and client projects. I’ll try to pay attention to my usage habits to see if I’m opening less browser tabs in Highrise.

So far, this is the one thing that I’m not quite sure about (yet).

Highrise meets Act-On

Once I saw that you could forward emails to Highrise and it’d auto-magically create a contact and store it, I jumped for joy (not literally… but I got an evil grin). I have been using (more like heavily relying on) Mail Act-On for what seems a really long time. I’m constantly forwarding emails off to my colleagues to keep things from sitting stagnant for too long. So, guess what I did?

This is working beautifully and allowed me to move about 20 contact requests to Highrise in just a few minutes.

With this new ability, I can remove that one project in Basecamp that I was using to collect contact request information. That information now has a proper home!

Manage your Peeps

I’m taking more screenshots and going to continue putting more of our contacts into Highrise… so… consider this part one of a short series of posts.

To be continued…

Seth Godin on Dialogue

Robby Russell — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:37:00 -0600

It appears that Seth Godin is catching on to the concept of Dialogue.

Seth writes, “Some organizations are good at listening. Some are good at talking. A few are even good at both.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I listen to clients, employees, friends, and family. All of our relationships are a series of conversations. Sometimes we can have healthy dialogue, sometimes we just fall victim to debate. (see Dialogue vs Debate)

If you’re really interested in Dialogue, I’d encourage you to review the technology of Dialogue... and check out the Dialogue-Driven Development project and introduce yourself.

Please Make Fun of the Boss

Robby Russell — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:26:00 -0600

While reviewing some articles related to small business management, I came across the following post… titled, Note From Boss to Employees, by Michael Wade. As a young business owner, who only 16 months ago was working in his attic… to now trying to figure out how to run a company with over ten employees (and growing), posts like this remind me that we all have so much to learn. :-)

Here are a few that I appreciated…

“I may not have been given a huge amount of training before being named to a supervisory position. As a result, I’ve had to learn through trial and error. That’s not always bad. Many of my responsibilities can only be learned through practice.”

Yep… that’s me! The only difference is that I promoted myself instead of being promoted by someone else. I’m still not sure what I got myself into sometimes. ;-)

“I will make mistakes. Please give me the same understanding that you’d like me to give you when you blunder.”

This reminded me of a blog post from last year, titled, Avoiding the most common software development goofs, which points out that things like ignorance and stress are often to blame for mistakes in development. I feel like these are reasons for goofs in just about any environment, especially business. Let’s face it. We’re not perfect and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes. Once we’ve agreed on this, let’s take the next step and see what happens.

“If I do something dumb or am on the verge of doing so, please tell me. Don’t hint. Tell me.”

Perhaps this is a common problem for most small business owners. Are employees afraid to tell me that I’m doing something dumb?

“If either of us has a problem with the other’s performance, let’s talk about it.”

As they say, real friends will be honest with you about your faults. Not because they want to make you look bad, but because they care.

Each of the points that I have listed here are pointing to is… healthier Dialogue, which is always a challenge to accomplish… in any relationship… whether with clients, coworkers, bosses, or employees.

I’d like to add a few to this list.

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness, than to ask for permission.
I’m still trying to get the hang of this GTD stuff, so.. you might remind me if I forgot something.
Ask yourself on a regular basis, “Am I having fun?” If not, make time for some.
Please make fun of the boss! :-)

Meet... Chris, Graeme., and Gary

Robby Russell — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:01:00 -0600

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. :-)

Seattle in late March

Robby Russell — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:35:00 -0600

I’m going to be hanging out in Redmond, WA. late next month… why? That… I’ll explain at a later date. ;-)

What I can say is that I’ll be available on a few evenings if anybody is interested in meeting up to talk shop, which can include anything from d3, ruby on rails, bdd, agile interaction design... to BBC comedy shows. :-)

I’ll be flying up from Portland to Seattle on Saturday, March 24th. I’m going to try and stay downtown for that night… and then will be staying at Sheraton Bellevue until Tuesday night. So… Saturday-Monday nights are currently open.

I’m also planning to head to the monthly Seattle.rb meeting on Tuesday, March 27th.

If you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a line.

UPDATE If you’re taking the kinky aspect of BDD too serious... please don’t email me. ;-)

Business of Rails Panel at RailsConf 2007

Robby Russell — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:57:00 -0600

Trying to finish my book and running PLANET ARGON consumes quite a bit of my time… so when the RailsConf people announced that they were accepting proposals for talks, I opted to pass so that it wouldn’t distract from my sprint to finish my book. :-)

This decision was even easier for me when Nathaniel Talbot invited me to be part of his proposal for a panel of people that are running companies that specialize with Ruby on Rails. I liked the idea and the other people that were invited were all people that I greatly admired and respected… so I said yes. After all, so much of my time and energy goes into this stuff and there isn’t any doubt that I spend way more time on the business side of Rails… than in code these days.

I just got an email from Nathaniel to let me know that his proposal was accepted.

So, if you’ll be at RailsConf 2007 (US), come see me on The Business of Rails panel session.

The following people are planned to be on the panel.

Moderator: Nathaniel Talbott, Terralien Inc.

Panelists include:

Justin Gehtland, Relevance, LLC
Geoffrey Grosenbach, Topfunky Corporation
Andre Lewis, earthcode.com
Joe O’Brien, EdgeCase, LLC
Robby Russell, Planet Argon, LLC

I hope that you all send Nathaniel some great (and tough) questions… ;-)

Rails 1.2 On CRN.com

Robby Russell — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:58:00 -0600

I was recently asked a few questions by Stacy Cowley, a writer for CRN about the Rails 1.2 release and how our Design and Development team at PLANET ARGON is adopting it. This Q&A session resulted in a brief article titled, Ruby on Rails Gets RESTFul in Major Update, which appeared on the CRN site last Friday afternoon.

Thanks to the Rails Core team and all of those in the community who continue to help make Ruby on Rails an awesome addition in my tool belt.

Announcement: New Ruby on Rails Deployment Group

Robby Russell — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:52:00 -0600

Our team is working on a new hosting solution¹ for Rails applications. Throughout this process, we’ve been reviewing all the various methods that our team and customers have been using to deploy and host applications written with Ruby on Rails. Our team has been able to closely watch the technologies change on our servers for almost two full years to accommodate the latest in deployment solutions.

Recently, a few deployment savvy customers of ours and us decided that it was time to take some of our experiences and conversations out into the public. We’d like to invite all of you that are interested in Rails deployment to join the new Deploying Rails google group. Whether you’re trying to setup a staging server, deploy to a shared solution like we offer at PLANET ARGON, managing your own VPS, or configuring a cluster of servers for your big launch, we’d love to talk with you about this stuff.

I’m secretly hoping that all the talented Rails deployment experts, like our friends at Rails Machine and Engine Yard, will join us in our effort. :-)

If you’re still hosting your Rails application on Apache and FCGI in a shared environment, this list is for you! ;-)

Join the group today!

UPDATE Zed Shaw has entered the building…

¹ Stay tuned in early February… ;-)

Robby on Rails: Category Business

Review: Braintree

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PLANET ARGON is seeking fresh talent... could it be you?

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #4

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Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #3

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Rails Business: Weekly Review #2

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Join the Community

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Rails Business: Weekly Review #1

Health Coverage

Client Expenses

Hosting Client Repositories

Naming Your Business

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Join the Community!

AT&T Online Support could use some QA

Ruby on Rails gets down to business

Hug Your Designer Day, part 2

Designers Versus Developers

Happy Designers and Happy Developers

Ruby on Rails meets the Business World

Where is Robby?

Introducing Boxcar... coming soon to a train station near you!

Speaking at Ostrava on Rails

Embracing Failure, part 1

Review: Highrise, part 2

Contact Form Integration

Direct Submissions (not yet)

Contact Request Submission

Manually Review in Mail.app (and apply 2-minute rule)

View/Edit message/contact in Highrise

Schedule Follow Up tasks

Five Day Review

Review: Highrise, part 1

First Impressions

Look and Feel

Highrise meets Act-On

Manage your Peeps

Seth Godin on Dialogue

Please Make Fun of the Boss

Meet... Chris, Graeme., and Gary

Chris

Graeme

Gary

Seattle in late March

Business of Rails Panel at RailsConf 2007

Rails 1.2 On CRN.com

Announcement: New Ruby on Rails Deployment Group