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I'm just a week into my first real job and I feel like the luckiest person in the world. Many people fresh out of graduate school still have to "pay their dues" at a company that values being in your cube by 8:00 am even if you were up until 1 last night getting another report finished. While graduate school is essentially a ROWE, there are still expectations to be in a chair from 9:00 - 5:30 (at least in my lab there were). While having the freedom to work when you want and how you want is amazing, it doesn't come without growing pains. After a couple of years of getting judged based on time in the lab, it's hard to remember that it's what I get done that matters and not when I do it. Read through to see how I managed to commit what would be a serious faux pas in any workplace other than a ROWE: I took a day off in my first week.
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Highgroove sent me, Jonathan, and Patrick to RailsConf
2012. I've been learning a lot by going to some great talks and
enjoying talking to my fellow Rails developers. If you see any of us, feel free
to say hello!
There's a big push to make this the most public RailsConf ever, so all talks are
being recorded. On top of that, I have also been trying to take notes and make
them public.
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Startup Weekend in Atlanta kicked off last night with over 116 participants, and 48 pitches, eventually forming into 18 teams. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to start something up -- a concept, business, or idea, over the weekend. It's centered around technology, with people dividing themselves into categories like: "business folk", "designers", "developers", and other niches. Yup, there was a technology lawyer, there too.
What kinds of ideas are being worked on right now?
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The Beltline Bikeshop App, Bike Spot, is LIVE and available to install on your iOS device!
If you know us, you know we love bikes here at Highgroove. Any cyclist in Atlanta has encountered the 'parking' headache of looking for a spot, much less a rack to lock to while getting around on two wheels. Bike Spot is a bike rack locator designed to track, record, and locate bike racks around town.
Sounds awesome, right? "But how can I use it?" you ask.
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Last night at the Highgroove Studios office, we held the March edition of Hack Night, our monthly social coding gathering. We focused on starting, polishing, and/or discussing open source projects ranging from the super useful to the super silly (beer is always provided at our hack nights...)
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Last month I had the privilege of attending the very first SpreeConf in New York City. If you aren't familiar with Spree, it is an awesome Rails e-commerce engine you can use to build a full-featured online store. The conference was held over two days; the first day featured several training sessions. The sessions covered a range of topics including theming, configuring, and testing Spree. The second day was filled not only with talks related to Spree, but to e-commerce and Open Source in general.
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Last Wednesday CBQ and I attended Startup Riot on behalf of Highgroove. We heard 3 minute pitches (and 3 minutes of questions from an expert panel) from 25 startups. This is easily the biggest event in the Atlanta startup community; missing it is not an option and sponsoring was a no brainer for us. We love working with startups, since we used to be one. Read more to learn about how we sponsored this event, and what we got out of it.
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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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by cbq
Published February 18, 2012 in
Community
The StartupRiot MAKE event kicked off last night at ATDC with the help of Sanjay Parekh and some very awesome sponsors and teams.
We're happy to be a part of this awesome event. At 5 pm on Friday, teams started trickling in and sponsors started setting up displays. The food arrived and many people began networking and planning already.
At 6 pm, Sanjay announced the teams, and each team got up and spoke about what they were building, and what they needed -- be it a designer, some mobile development help, or back-end development.
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Waaaayyy back in December, I had the pleasure of attending a code
retreat.
In that post, I discussed what I learned.
This month, I had the pleasure of facilitating a code
retreat a few weeks
ago. Thanks to
Highgroove, TapJoy,
FourAthens, and my co-coordinator Travis
Douce, the Athens Code Retreat was a resounding
success.
Also, a special shout out to our Code Retreat homies in South
Africa led by
Corey Haines, who handed off the baton to us late in
their day but early in ours.
Read on to find out how lessons learned from facilitating compares to attending,
how the general "You" actually means "I" in the blog title, and how many times
it takes (me) to learn the four rules of simple design.
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Going in to my third week here at Highgroove, I already feel like my
first couple weeks have been some of my best in any work environment,
both in terms of my personal productivity and my happiness at work.
I'm still completing my undergraduate degree at Georgia Tech.
As any student at Tech will be quick to tell you, the school is often
very demanding of its students. This can often make a good balance
between work and school difficult, and juggling the two over the past
couple years of school has been challening.
Enter Highgroove, a ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment).
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In case you missed it, the awesome Globay Day of
Coderetreat occurred on
December 3rd. The amount of fun I experienced was unexpected and impressive!
I learned some things too. Read on to find out what.
(Also, don't worry if you missed the code retreat, sad kitten has some good news
for you at the end of this post.)
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The first couple of weeks in a new position for a new company is usually peppered with stressful stretches of striving to become useful and relevant mixed with hours of boredom working on a project of little importance. At Highgroove, we are immediately thrown into the mix and are expected to perform.
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RubyConf, ahhh Rubyconf.
How was it this year you ask? To answer that question we must first address the
question:
How was my first ruby conf?
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He may be too humble* to admit it but Andy Lindeman, one of our new(er) hires, is awesome.
He recently did a lightning presentation on Solr and Sunspot for the Huntsville Ruby Group. See the announcement over on his blog and give him some feedback!
* We only hire the humblest programmers. It is in the company charter.
April 9th and 10th in San Francisco was the first ever CodeConf. Read on for a recap on this incredibly insightful and wonderful conference.
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If I simply wanted to learn the basics of Cucumber, RGeo, TorqueBox, or any number of other interesting open-source Ruby technologies, I could sit down at my desk and read documentation, check out the source code, or post to a mailing list if I ran across a problem.
But how much more could I benefit if I were able to speak face-to-face to an expert? Or sit at a table of Rubyists from many different backgrounds and spar about the pros and cons of these tools?
Documentation, source code, and mailing lists on their own simply cannot compete with a good technical conference.
I attended Magic Ruby 2011 in Orlando, FL this past weekend. I learned a lot, and additionally learned how much I still need to learn! I have highlighted a few talks that really stood out to me below, but you can check out the full list of talks and slides.
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We’re still recovering from RubyConf (specifically the 10k, Jonathan’s first ever, has yet to release its iron grip on his calves), but we have had some time to reflect on what value we at Highgroove extracted from the conference.
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“On your mark, get set, GO!” Nothing like the thrill of starting an intense race, whether it be a short hundred-meter dash or a long, grueling marathon.
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I recently completed my first sprint triathlon. The feeling of accomplishment
was overwhleming and I almost cried crossing the finish line. For those not
familiar, a sprint triathlon consists of a 400m swim, a sixteen mile bike ride, and
a three mile run in that order. Numerous volunteers provide water, gatorade,
directions and most importantly, moral support and kind words along the
course. I’m unable to overstate how welcome and vital words of encouragement
are. “You can do it!” “Great job! Keep it up!”.
As overlwhelmed, exhausted, accomplished, and inspired as I felt crossing the
finish line, a more inspiring moment came later, much much later. And it also
helped me answer the question “Will I compete again?”
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Jonathan Wallace has joined the Highgroove Team!
Jonathan joins us as a Ruby and Rails Developer, out of our Atlanta office. Jonathan blogs over at Two Minute Spates on Ruby, Rails, iPhone, git, and entrepreneurship.
His previous role had him telecommuting, so joining our Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) will be easy for him!
Now, if only we could find time to pull him away from all that awesome client work to fill out his bio for the Highgroove Team page….
by cbq
Published October 23, 2009 in
Community
Alanta’s (3rd?) Startup Weekend is on Nov 13 – Nov 15 at ATDC.
We’re big fans of Startup Weekend for a couple of reasons:
- the constraints — successful businesses are built on limited resources. A single weekend to come up with ideas, plan, execute, and launch a business is a daunting and fantastic lesson for anyone interested in starting a business.
- the people — what happens when you get 15 crazy developers, 20 biz-dev folk, sprinkle in some opinionated graphic designers and some marketing know-it-alls? Sheer madness, of course! I don’t think you could build a better simulation for working with a diverse team towards a common goal.
- the camaraderie — the business(es) coming out of Startup Weekend may not ever become the next Google (or Skribit), but the ideas and lessons learned by all are sure to make the tide rise here in Atlanta!
A very big thank you to our friends at The Kauffman Foundation, ATDC (and all the other sponsors) for their support of this Atlanta event.
by cbq
Published February 17, 2009 in
Community
Highgroove is attending Startup Riot 2009 tomorrow. We’re excited to be attendees this year (last year we were presenters on Scout).
If you’re attending, be sure to say “hi!” to Matt and I!
Many critics are hailing Little Big Planet as the video game of the year. Its “flexible, fun, and powerful” level creator and sharing system has created an interactive platform never before seen in gaming.
But you don’t need to tell our James Edward Gray II about it – in March, at the MountainWest Ruby Conference" in Salt Lake City, he’ll be giving a featured speech on how Ruby programmers can learn from Little Big Planet’s creative problem solving and code reading. He’ll also be discussing some of the most creative Ruby projects out there, showing how their developers build servers, optimize code, and more.
A Playstation 3 and advanced knowledge of Super Mario Brothers Level 1-1 is optional but encouraged for attendees of this talk.
MerbCamp is the first official gathering for the Merb community.
Our own Matt Todd is speaking on “Going Beyond Web Sites with Merb” — where he’ll talk about using Merb to do things other than just your run-of-the-mill web-sites — things like APIs, Web Services, lightweight protocols, and making your grass greener. Well, maybe not that last one.
You can Register at:
http://merbcamp.com/
Come see us talk about Scout Server Monitoring and Reporting at StartupRiot on May 19, 2008, and watch all the other startups present their wares. This looks to be a really great event.
See ya there!
Recently I’ve been reading Obie Fernandez’s book, The Rails Way.
I made an appearance in one of the chapters, but the real credit goes to Obie for pulling together an exhaustive 850-page book.
It’s not for beginners, but if you’ve taken one of my Rails training classes, it’s a great reference book and next step.
Reviews of the Rails Way:
Just a quick note that I’ll be speaking on "Lessons from the Trenches “ Learning from the Rails Bootcamp at the regional Ruby on Rails Conference dubbed acts_as_conference (a play on the Rails way of introducing behavior through code) in Orlando, Florida, on Feb 8-9.
If you’re interested in how to effectively teach your friends, colleagues, bosses, and maybe even your mom about Ruby on Rails, registration is now open to the public. Looks to be a great conference line-up, with keynoters Obie Fernandez and Dan Benjamin, and plenty of great talks.
I’ll be representing Highgroove at the Lone Star Rubyconf this weekend. I’ll give two talks, one for the charity event the night before and another at the main conference.
At the charity event I’m going to go over Ruby’s block syntax. I’ll cover what blocks are, how they are used, and give a lot of great examples. This is a good talk to sit in on if you’re new to Ruby and it’s even for a good cause.
For the conference I’m going to talk about heroes and super powers. I’m sure I’ll manage to sneak a little Ruby in there too, for those that enjoy that. This talk takes an in depth look at glue code and Ruby’s features supporting such. It’ll be fun stuff that doesn’t get talked about enough.
If you are attending the conference, do flag me down and say hello. I’m always interested in meeting fellow Rubyists.
Hope to see you there!
There are countless links out there that will bury you in suggestions for how to write Rails code, so I’m going to take the road less travelled and give you three non-code tips that I think are really important.
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by james
Published July 08, 2006 in
Community
About half of the geeks of the world prefer newsgroups for communication and the other half swears by mailing lists. (A tiny percentage prefer web forum or pigeon, but clearly these people suffer from insanity.) The Ruby community has long had both: the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and the Ruby-Talk mailing list.
In 2001, a band of clever adventurers and Rubyists united the two communities with heroic feats of hacking. A “gateway” script was installed that dutifully ferried all messages from one group to the other and visa versa. This was a blessing, because both sides now shared the collective Ruby knowledge. A golden age began.
Unfortunately, a few months back, the evil server hosting monster struck and slew the gateway with a single stoke! (In all fairness, the hosting provided to the gateway over the last five years was more than generous, but that just doesn’t make for as good a story and I’m telling this one!) The golden age ended, the community shattered into two halves…
At HighGroove, we couldn’t stand for that.
Knowing the peril involved, I enlisted the help of the brave HighGroove SysWizard Charles and we went in search of a gateway in need of rescue. It was a long journey and we suffered a minor defeat along the way, but good always triumphs over evil and we cannot be stopped easily!
I’m happy to bring the good news to all the peoples of the Ruby kingdom: the gateway has been resurrected. The golden age has come again.
Please join me thanking all those patrons who sponsored our quest:
- Dave Thomas, First Knight of Ruby, penned the original gateway code and it only needed minor updates even a squire like me could figure out to restore it to its former glory.
- Dennis Oelkers, former Guardian of the Gateway, helped us locate the script-in-distress and taught us much about the care and feeding of such a creature.
- Fred Senault, James’s new best friend by sworn oath, generously gave the gateway the life giving kiss: a newsgroup account.
- The afore mentioned SysWizard Charles, who can quite literally conjure servers to host gateways with the snap of his fingers. His powers are beyond compare.
Thanks to these brave men, the knowledge is again shared by all! Use it wisely my fellow adventurers…
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