Highgroovers keep up with new trends by attending at
least one conference per year. Besides bringing us up to date on what's shiny, they
help us network, learn about the bleeding edge of our field from academics, and gain new
perspectives on what we do. But conferences aren't necessarily vacations, and
juggling a conference and a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) can be tricky. Read on to see how
we handle conferences in a ROWE while keeping our clients happy.
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When an app requires full-text search developers usually have two major
contenders to choose from: Solr and
ElasticSearch. Each addresses different use
cases, but generally, ElasticSearch performs noticeably
better
when an app expects frequent reindexing, as is often the case. Gems like
Tire make setting up ElasticSearch a breeze,
but setting up more advanced indexes and interfacing with ActiveRecord can
sometimes be a pain. Read on to see how to make your life easier with
ElasticSearch and Tire.
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Ruby inherits the philosophy of "there's more than one way to do it," or TMTOWTDI, from Perl. Of course, TMTOWTDI is worthless unless at least a handful of those ways can be written clearly not just for the author, but (perhaps more importantly) for future readers and editors. So, how do you make the best use of the many ways Ruby and Rails allow you to do things?
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At Highgroove, we have a personal trainer, Cherri, on-staff and on-site, available twice a week to us, scheduled via appointment slots using Google Calendar. Our personal trainer has been with us since December of last year, and we just added more sessions. We have been delighted at the opportunity to get in shape (although, perhaps, temporarily less thrilled when "core day" came around). Personally, having someone motivate us to exercise -- someone who thoroughly knows what they are doing was exactly the motivation I needed to start working out again. But we've also realized getting a gym session in during the afternoon has benefits for developing software (along with developing sweet abs).
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Cluster analysis methods have been gaining popularity as a way of Relating pieces of data in large datasets with one another. Examples in social networking are obvious: friends on Facebook cluster into cliques and communities, which cluster into even larger groups. Demographics and other marketing research can also be aided by sorting prospective customers into groups based on preference.
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Highgroove's "bias towards action" rallying cry is no secret, and we try to abide by that rule whenever we can, whether we're deploying or choosing where to go for lunch. An important corollary is that we try to bias towards making mistakes earlier rather than later, too. A fellow Highgroover captured it well by saying: "If you aren't getting burned, you need to play with fire more."
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Bayesian networks have proven extremely useful for classifying events and documents, reliability analysis, and in many other fields. Essentially, wherever a well-defined chain of causation given between many pieces of data exists, a Bayes net can help provide probabilities for the "hidden variables" of a system: in the cases above, for example, the category a document belongs to, the probability a system will fail if a certain component fails, etc.
As part of another project here at Highgroove, I've been developing a gem called glymour that learns a Bayes net's structure automatically, which is important when it becomes impractical to manually define causal relationships (e.g. when taking into account dozens of different variables). Working on an open-source gem while relating it to a larger project has made me understand one of its many benefits: open source code is kind of like a constrained writing in which you are constrained to being as general-purpose as possible (and reasonable).
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by brian
Published August 30, 2011 tagged with:
ROWE
As the youngest Highgroover, I don’t have quite as much reference to contrast a ROWE with a 9-to-5 type work environment. But I could tell within my first week here that working without a timeclock allows us to have an incredible amount of flexibility.
A lot of writing about ROWE focuses on the way it handles time off: your weekend can be anytime, you can leave for a movie on a Thursday, etc. This seems to me like a silly way to sell the idea. A student who really wants to pass his classes bases his partying around his studying, not vice versa. So why schedule a work week around your weekend if you really want results? Because of this, when I started working for Highgroove I tried paying attention to how our work environment allowed us to get things done.
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