The Highgroove blog. Sit pit-side with us to learn how we work. Sometimes technical, sometimes business-oriented, but always focused on simple solutions.
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by mike
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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by jonathan
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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by jonathan
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.
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.
Last night, I spoke at the Georgia Tech Entrepreneur Society on “Building a Product.”
I have built several products myself, and everyday we are heavily involved in the building of products for our wonderful clients at Highgroove. Before the talk, my mind was spinning with ideas on what to tell these Georgia Tech Entrepreneurs.
I ended up telling a few stories, but there are really two main points I wanted to impart, that I’ve seen make products (at least, web-based, or technology-based products) successful:
This is crucial. There is no way you can make a product without using it day to day. Many of the improvements Derek and Andre make to Scout are gradual adjustments that build on each other, adding up to something big over time (charts are a good example). 1
The clients we’ve seen that use their own product have a much better chance of succeeding, we can attest to this.
Nobody likes to fail. When you get good at failing, it’s actually more like a lesson. In fact, when you get really good at marketing, each tiny lesson is actually “a stepping stone towards success.” We’ve made plenty of mistakes building products, but the worst is continuing down a path that just isn’t right, or won’t amount to any value.
We’ve given up plenty of times, and blogged about it. It’s important, when you give up, to assess why — we like doing that through blogging and sharing about our failures (and successes). 2
Thanks to the Georgia Tech Entrepreneur Society for hosting me. If you’re a Georgia Tech student interested in business, startups, and tech, they have weekly meetings and speakers.
1 Our failed experiment: great on the rack, bad in the mirror on the Scout Blog
2 We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned on the Scout Blog
by cbq
At last month’s Atlanta Ruby User Group (Meetp), I gave a presentation on “Teaching Ruby on Rails.”
I’ve taught Ruby on Rails for the Big Nerd Ranch for almost 4 years now, and given on-site trainings all over the world, from Wells Fargo to the New York Times, to startups and even government agencies. I’ve also done this talk before at the first Acts As Conference (Ruby on Rails local conference in Orlando, Florida), but I have refined it a bit based on more experience teaching Rails at various organizations.
Being an effective teacher, and thus, Teaching Rails (and for that matter, any real technical programming language and framework) boils down to 4 main points:
We’re hoping to get video of the presentation up soon, but if you just want access to the slides with notes, I’ve provided them in the footnotes.
James and Dana are back from Mountain West Ruby Conf, and the videos of their talks are up:
http://mwrc2009.confreaks.com/
James said of the conference:
“The talks were very high caliber, the venue great, and the hosts generous. This conference also proves that not only does a single-track conference still work, it’s just plain better.”
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.
Come see Matt talk about the Rack project, a minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks that’s behind the new Rails Metal functionality.
He’ll be going over Rack, and showing an example of a quick and dirty framework. He may even show how we use Rack handler’s to help handle Scout’s load.
Other topics include:
Check out the Atlanta Ruby Meetup Group and the January Meeting Event Details for more information.
by cbq
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:
We’ve had the pleasure of working with Matt Todd recently on several Highgroove projects.
Matt’s going to be speaking at RubyFringe, “an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies” on July 18-20, 2008 in Toronto, Canada.
And while there is a very clever joke I could insinuate about Matt’s talk entitled Being Dumb And Using It To Your Advantage, on Matt being “the expert on dumb,” I can’t quite come up with it — and then there’s the fact that he is actually really frickin’ smart.
If you’ve ever thought of an idea, only to convince yourself “eh, that’ll never work, that’s a dumb idea” — his talk will make you think otherwise.
For those who missed my talk at the most excellent Acts As Conference put on by the good folks at Rails For All in Orlando, Florida — here’s the cheat sheet.
My talk was on the lessons learned from teaching the Ruby on Rails Bootcamp and various on-site Trainings over the past year and a half. Here are the 4 key things you need to do to be a successful trainer:
Define Your Purpose – Come up with a clear, specific, desired outcome. Are you attempting to teach the basics, or promote mastery? A quick how-to, or a detailed guide to a particular way of development? A clear purpose helps your audience hit the ground running. An unorganized braindump can leave your students frustrated when they go at it alone.
Know Your Audience – You’ve got to understand everything you can about your audience. This means not only their current level of knowledge, but their past experiences, and even their goals. Ask questions before and during your training to understand everything you can about them. This will help immensely with the next tip.
Give Relevant Examples – Cater your examples to the domain that your audience knows. If you are teaching a bunch of journalists, use concepts from the publishing world. Never use foo, bar, or any other made up word in any example. If you don’t know, guess, and if your audience corrects you on the concept, you now have attentive listeners, contributing to your solution!
Teach How to Learn – Show, don’t tell. Stress how to find out why something works the way it does. Give plenty of examples, and help your audience figure out concepts. Give them the resources to continue learning and to find out more. Show them how you figured it out, or where you went to learn.
I’m sure there are plenty more tips, but I’ve found these 4 to be extremely valuable to me in coming up with valuable lessons and ways of teaching. Thanks to everyone who came up to me afterward to ask questions and share feedback about teaching!
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.
