It’s been a pleasure working on this project, and I am very pleased in the progress I’ve made in such a short time. I look forward to going live in another two to three weeks, once the site has been through QA and any changes required.

—

This coming Wednesday, May 16, I am off to RailsConf 2007, in the lovely city of Portland, Oregon. Portland is great, I have been there twice and I’ve had a great time each trip. I look forward to the visit very much.

Two of my coworkers from the Williams F1 project, Kyle Drake and Nick Wright, are going to be attending RailsConf as well. It’s gonna be great to meet them face-to-face. Daniel Browning, one of my fellow coworkers at my new job, lives just north of Portland. My college buddy Ken Williams lives in the Portland area too. I plan to meet with them at some time during this, my third visit to Portland.

There are so many sessions I want to attend at RailsConf. But interestingly enough, I feel I won’t get any value out of the tutorial sessions, so I didn’t sign up for any of them. That means I’m out of the tutorial-attending n00b league, yeah! We’ll see whether I can hang on to that thought in the other, more advanced sessions.

A few of the sessions sound downright dull. I guess some of the n00bs will find them interesting, since they’re looking for ‘insight’ and whatnot. Whatever.

What am I looking for from RailsConf? I’m looking for some nitty-gritty I can sink my teeth into, some new tech I can experiment with and learn more from. I’m looking forward to have my brain blown by something cool but complicated that I can learn over the next few months. I want to learn about some new-to-me techniques and plugins or gems that I can master and take my Ruby and Rails to a higher level.

I also look forward to meeting some people face to face. Tim Bray is going to be delivering the keynote on Saturday morning. If you’ve been reading my blog for the last year, you already know what I think of him: he’s the d00d!

The JRuby guys will be presenting one session, and I think their work is of importance for the growth of Rails outside the leading edge. I think JRuby will be the thing to help Rails cross the chasm and be adopted by mainstream.

At OSCON 2005, DHH signed my Agile Web Development With Rails 1st Edition, so I will try to get Robert Martin, Dave Thomas, and Andy Hunt to sign some of my other books that they wrote.

Anyway, I’ll talk to you all later!

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, open.source, web.architecture, web.technologies, railsconf

Full credit where credit is due:

Endemol UK was contracted by Williams F1 to develop the site. After some months of dicking around, Endemol subcontracted Futurecorp to finish the job. Futurecorp is the UK virtual IT shop that hired me and other developers on an hourly basis for this project. We rewrote the full app in seven weeks and went live with it.

Not to be picky, but I wanted to make sure that the above was not left unsaid.

During the last seven weeks, we developed a complete content management system for Williams F1 news reports, event calendar, podcast and video content delivery, and Flash content management. The news, audio, video and event calendar is displayed in a user-friendly manner in a xhtml-strict compliant web front end for sports journalist access. The CMS also produces and manages content for a Flash front end for use by us common folk.

It has been a crazy time, especially the first three 65-plus-hour weeks of horror. I am particularly proud of those three weeks, because we had a fully functional application finished by that time. Rails really is that productive, folks. This was not a small application by any means.

The last four weeks have been more tame, with interminable boring hours of online chit chat BS sessions in Campfire, as developers waited and waited for QA to finish testing and maybe find a few lowly bugs for us developers to squash. The bug count was really low and we developers went home hungry some days.

Congratulations to all of the people below. I will miss working with all of you, it’s been a great time.

Ruby on Rails Team

Team Lead: Nick Wright, Colorado, USA

Kyle Drake, Minnesota, USA
Mark Selby, UK
Dougal Shearer, Scotland
Steven Holloway, Australia
Yury Kotlyarov, Russia
Brad Bollenbach, Montreal, Canada
and myself, Puerto Rico, USA territory

—

HTML Team

Team Lead: Dan Whitmarsh, Sweden

Gary Robinson, UK & Ben Miller, UK

—

Flash Team

Team Lead: Matt Folkard, UK

Tim Cooper, UK & Julian Wilson, L.A., California, USA

—

Support & Infrastructure Team

Team Lead: Jason Griffiths, UK

—

Project Leads:

Michael Christenson, Ohio, USA
Williams Project Lead, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Shaun Laughey, UK
Director of Operations, Futurecorp UK Ltd

—

Management:

Max Haggenmiller, UK
General Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Radha Stirling, UK
Head of Development, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Justin Fanning, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Eddie Bosticco, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development

Akismet tells me that it has blocked over 1900 comment spam since March 22, and 3,130 since I installed it. I have only had three or four false negatives. That is, spam that wasn’t caught and ended up in my moderation queue. I made an effort to go through all my caught spam looking for false positives, and found none.

—

So when they flew me to NYC for lunch, I was very sure this company was interested in hiring me (duh!) I had a great time talking with the company CEO and the president, enjoying their wit and seeing their lifelong friendship at work during our discussions. That was quite interesting. I also had a good conversation with a fellow grunt, Sonny, with whom I will probably be working. I start at the new job on April 16.

They paid for my flight, overnight stay, and lunch. The lunch was really enjoyable, both conversation-wise and food-wise. I don’t remember the name of the family-oriented seafood restaurant where we went. It was within two or three blocks of Broadway and 19th Street. I want to go there again and try more items from their menu.

At the end of the day, I received a job offer, which I accepted. I’ll still be working from home as a Ruby on Rails developer, but I will be a salaried full-timer with benefits, instead of an hourly gun-for-hire. I have had enough of the gun-for-hire lifestyle for now, and this opportunity with this company was too good to pass up.

—

NYC was a hoot. I saw this guy with a giant inflatable cockroach in front of a building. Turns out he was a paid protester! When some group wants to protest something, they hire this guy, and he prints out some flyers, drives to wherever they ask him to go, gets out the giant inflatable rat and/or the giant inflatable cockroach, gets out his bullhorn, and he has a protest! He is also available for political campaigns, but he prefers hanging out with the cockroach and the rat. I thought that was pretty funny.

Another funny aspect of NYC, is that every block has at least one guy in a small plexiglass shop on wheels hitched to a truck, selling a bagel or donut with coffee for about $3. Each of these vendors has enough coffee, bagels and donuts for a few hours of sales. When they run out, they drive to the bakery where they get their goods, stock up, and drive back to the area they were last at, to continue selling their wares.

I really had a good time in Manhattan, and would like to visit again and do more touristy things.

—

After my interview in NYC last March, I took a train to Lancaster County, PA, and stayed with my friend the sci-fi writer, her husband and twin 3 year old girls. I rented a car to visit my other college friends and an aunt and her husband in Southeastern PA over the weekend. It was great to see everybody and to see them well. I’m glad they all live within one and a half hours of each other.

I am going to be planning a move to the Philadelphia suburbs over the next six months. I don’t own any furniture, don’t have a wife and kids, so it’s just me, my computers, and game consoles. I’ll probably disassemble the two PC clone towers and ship the parts separately, then reassemble them back in PA.

—

Wednesday is my last day at the hourly Rails gig. It has been a crazy seven weeks. We’ve been ready to go live for the last two weeks or so, but the client wanted some changes to how a few things worked. And of course that meant new bugs to stomp.

I’ve thrown in a few hints as to what the site is about, specifically mentioning yesterday’s Malaysian Gran Prix in a previous post. I can’t wait to show off what we’ve worked on. It really is a cool site. Latest news is that we go live Wednesday, but I’m taking that with a grain of salt. So don’t hold me to it.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development, upgrades, wordpress

They’ve been in touch with me for the last six weeks. I have had 4 phone interviews with them. This is the final face-to-face interview in their hiring process. If all goes well during and after lunch and we still like each other, they’ll be a job contract to sign when all is said and done.

—

After the interview, I will have the rest of the week and weekend to spend as I like. I’ll be staying in Southeastern Pennsylvania with my friend the sci-fi author, her husband and twin 3 year old girls. I will visit other friends and family in SE PA over the weekend. It will be great to see them again. Last I saw them was in August of 2005.

—

It’s been six weeks with the racing-oriented Ruby on Rails custom CMS. The past two weeks have been kind of slow work wise. There’s been very little overtime compared to the first four weeks of the project. Since I last wrote about the project here, I’ve done some on-the-job learning about RJS and the Prototype JavaScript library, and about Capistrano and deploying on Apache clusters.

In these past two weeks, there were short bursts of frantic bug squashing in between quiet hours of chit chat in the project’s Campfire group chat and on Skype. It was difficult to stay awake some evenings, when there was nothing to do but chat, and wait for the customer to QA the latest release.

Speaking of release, the client finally wants to go live, on Monday, April 2nd. This Monday evening, the code was deployed to the live Apache and MySQL cluster where the application will live out its public life.

Just in time for the Malaysian Gran Prix next weekend, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development

The Rails app I have been working on should be up already, but it’s out of our hands now. The customer is tasked with deploying it, not us. The first race of the F1 championship starts Sunday March 18. If the site goes up after that, it’s gonna lose impact. But that’s not my responsibility.

I want to show it off already. It’s been a crazy four weeks, and the site looks and runs great. I had nothing to do with the visual aspects. I’m a Rails code monkey, not a graphic designer by any means. Our web designer did a great job on the CMS and press/journalist access site, along with the Flash guys’ tremendous job on the Flash client on the consumer site.

Before this project, I had only worked on Rails with another Rails newcomer, for just six months last summer. But in this project I am working with a few Rails experts. One of them is even a Rails open source contributor. And I learned just how much I didn’t know. I am humbled and acknowledge I am just a junior Rails developer.

So I’m back to the books for more knowledge. I meant to do that earlier, but the overtime kept me away. Since I have the weekend off, I’m gonna study some more Rails stuff, like RJS and RESTful web services.

(Aside: You know you’re a real geek when you have the weekend off from working in front of a computer, and your time off consists of sitting in front of a computer, studying about work-related stuff.)

Also, I’ve already started writing a post about using embedded Ruby templates and ActiveRecord within command-line Ruby scripts. This can be useful to generate templated emails, XML feeds, and all kinds of other formatted output from cron jobs and the like using Ruby. I’m sure that will be of interest to quite a few Ruby fans.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna use my free Thursday evening to begin to catch up on some teevee and anime I’ve had to let accumulate in my BitTorrent folder in the last four weeks. I also look forward to IMing with friends tonight for more than a few sentences, without having to divide my attention between work chat discussions and my friends’ conversations.

Talk to you again soon!

Technorati Tags:
software.development, rails, ruby

This project is huge both in scope and publicity, for our customer and for Rails. And we go live after Monday, March 12! There is still work after that, but next week, you all will get to know what I was working on! That’s cool! I’ve been dying to tell you. In some countries, this is as big as NASCAR.

The project backend is in Rails, and like most systems, it has a data entry component and an end user component. In this project, one data entry system feeds two end user components with more or less the same data, but styled and delivered differently. As I mentioned two weeks ago, this is a project about car racing, and as in any sport, the press and the consumer both need different levels of access to information about the race cars, the racers, and the race information itself.

One of the coolest aspect of this project is working with delivery from the Rails side, of Atom feeds to a Flash client. The Flash client is slick enough, as you will soon see. But the support of XML generation in Rails is sick slick. I would love to write about that in the future, as there are plenty of gotchas to learn about and work around.

I was not responsible for the Flash side of this project, not in the least. It was perfected by one of the masters of the craft, along with two other cool Flash guys. Hats off to them. Next week they get their 5 minutes of fame on this blog, as I will mention all team members by name when all is out in the open and the stupid NDA is moot.

Alright, I have to get going, as I have to eat dinner before I throw myself into the pit of overtime one last time. It’s all smooth sailing after Thursday night.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, system.architecture, web.architecture, web.services

So to cut to the chase, I got a great hourly-pay remote development gig working on a Ruby on Rails project, on a really cool sounding website, for a very-high-profile vehicle racing company in the UK. It’s right down Ken’s alley, but if I’m not mistaken, this sport usually has a definitely more European racing audience. I think American racing fans like Ken, might resent these are not American cars, and just don’t watch. LOL

I cannot disclose any more information because of client confidentiality, but I think I may already have said too much. :-p

I’ll post a link here when the site goes up, at any rate. Only then can we drop all this silly NDA crap. It’s a bummer, because I can’t discuss application architecture specifics that would be of interest to my readers.

But fret not. There’s no rule about my discussing the project’s architecture in general. I just can’t say right out what architecture I’m dealing with on this gig.

I’ll be writing more about Rails in the weeks ahead, but just cuz I write about it, don’t mean it’s got a thing to do with work, you hear? :: rolls eyes ::

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, life, software.development, open.source, web.architecture, system.architecture, web.technologies, web.services

I am more likely to cover Ruby on Rails and Ruby as a language and cross-platform development technology versus other open source technologies, as this is what I now prefer. But you may also see posts on C and C++, Java Enterprise Edition technologies, Python, Mozilla technologies such as XUL and XULRunner, and software development ideas in general. I may cover C# and .Net, but only because you can develop cross-platform applications with them using Mono.

My article proposals for “the secret online geekly articles site” are most likely to be accepted if they are about Java technologies. As I research my articles, I am bound to write about Java subjects here. But I’ll try to make the weblog posts more general than the articles. If the article proposals get turned down after a few rewritings and retries, I will publish the subject here or try to get them published somewhere else, like InfoQ and The Server Side.com. (BTW, that should be a hint that those two sites aren’t “the secret online geekly articles site.”)

I will also cover some Unix administration topics. For example, I feel I ought to cover the details of pjtrix’s Subversion configuration, as I found the online manual a bit wanting in specifics. Other like-minded geeks, the very people I’d like to bring to my weblog, might welcome a more direct approach. There are also more ssh tricks I haven’t begun to cover.

All of this writing will hopefully be bringing new readers to my humble weblog and other parts of the website. Armed with this hope, I continue to get pjtrix.com ready for 2007.

Tuesday night, I signed up to Google Analytics and Tools for Webmasters, and added to the WordPress and Trac templates the bits of JavaScript that report to Google where you all come from. The reports Google provides are nice and pretty, but I find Google’s solution wanting, specially in their support of blogging and citizen media. The tools are more geared towards “website” traffic analysis. That’s just lame.

Not everyone that will come here will do so with a JavaScript-powered browser. Feed readers and podcast clients, for instance, only speak HTTP and RSS or Atom. They will leave no trace in Google Analytics’ logs.

To complement Google Analytics, I’ve installed the Webalizer Apache log analysis tool, which will help me study my web server logs in more detail without my being swamped in hundreds of megabytes of raw text.

I also installed the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin. This should help direct search-passers-by to what’s hot on this site, or just make it more clear sooner that they got to the wrong place.

Hopefully, the combination of Google Analytics, Webalizer, and Popularity Contest, will together help me learn who my audience is, learn what is “my voice,” and learn how to make this weblog more valuable to my readers.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, ssh, software.development, open.source, web.architecture, wordpress, weblogs, web.technologies, web.services, cross.platform

Last weekend, I finally got Trac and Subversion installed like I wanted: read-only anonymous checkouts through http://svn.pjtrix.com/projectname, and read/write access for certain users only through svn+ssh://svn.pjtrix.com/var/svn/projectname.

As is almost always the case with things Unixy, the problems all had to do with setting the right permissions on the repository folder, and making sure that all related processes create new files with the right permissions set. The fix was a litany of addgroups, modusers, chowns, and chmods. Then I had to make substitute shell scripts for all the subversion commands, which simply set umask 002 before running the actual command.

After the Trac and Subversion headaches came Christmas, so I took a three-day break, visiting family, starting to read one of a few dozen fiction books from my “to read” pile, and generally chilling out. Then from Thursday through Saturday, I only worked on proposals for articles for “the secret online geekly articles site.” I hope to get at least one article proposal accepted in the next weeks.

I also found a potential employer, a place in Amhurst, MA called Assembla.com. They are a remote development consulting company, looking for Ruby on Rails developers that can work remotely. Their main product is something like a mashup between a wiki, a social network site, and a project management repository. They also do custom remote development for customers.

The interesting thing about Assembla.com, is that the hiring process consists of a type of paid audition: instead of sitting through interviews, getting your references and work history checked out, and usual job-getting stuff, they assign you a task out of their real workload, and pay you for a week or two while you get it done. If you accomplish the task to their satisfaction, you’re offered a permanent contract. If not, well, you can keep trying. I’m going to be applying this coming week.

I need to get my time organized, that’s certainly step one of the New Year. I want to work on iCal to GCal Sync and do more pjtrix goodness. I also will need to work on whatever tech article gets the a-OK. And I also need to concentrate on passing a paid trial for Assembla.com. Easy peasy. (Hint: that was sarcasm, folks. But I’ll try nonetheless.)

What I will probably end up doing, is divide my days into five-hour periods, not including sleeping, eating, my mandatory 20-minutes-away-from-the-computers-every-two-hours, and hygiene time. I’ll work on only one thing each period, then rotate among tasks every five hours. It will be like working three part-time at-home jobs! I’ll be like a homemaker mom.

Alright, that about does it with the updates. If I think of anything else, it will be my first post for 2007! See you then!

Technorati Tags:
hacks, rails, ruby, life, software.development, open.source

It’s not a permanent job, it’s more like “we’ll pay you decent money if we publish your article.” Print magazines pay a pittance for a two-thousand word article. This website pays pittance x 3, making it a lot more worth the trouble. If I can get on the stick and write an article per month, it could make a decent source of part-time income.

I know I’m being vague about the site. Once I get my first article published, believe me, I’ll post all the details.

—-

I have finished setting up Trac for hosting my open source projects. As if installing Subversion last week wasn’t enough, Trac configuration took a lot more trial and error. My web hosting provider uses Plesk for setting up web domains. Even though I know my way fairly well around Apache, I had used the Plesk configuration app to set up this web site and my friends’ websites on this server. I practically painted myself into a corner, as Plesk doesn’t like geeks messing around the Apache config files, which you have to do to set up Trac and Subversion. ** sigh **

I am still fighting with the configuration of the Subversion code repository. I want to have check-ins through ssh+svn, and anonymous checkouts through HTTP via Apache mod_dav_svn. I hope to have that all set up tonight so that I can check in the first files of my open source project’s code.

—-

I like and use Google Calendar, but as a bona fide code geek, I am more interested in getting my calendar data out and integrating Google Calendar into desktop and web applications.

My first open source project for pjtrix is a Mac OS X application to integrate together iCal and Google Calendar. In the last few weeks, I’ve been researching the Google Calendar API, writing some test applications to insert calendar events into Google Calendar, pull calendar events out, change calendar event data and put it back in, etc. It’s all done in Ruby, which has made it all really nice.

Right now the integration between iCal and Google Calendar is only one-way. You can import your iCal calendars into Google Calendar. Or you can import your Google Calendar calendars into iCal. But you can’t have changes flow from one application to the other without creating a mess of duplicates every time you change the date or time of an event.

You can read more information about my project at the project’s Trac home page.

Technorati Tags:
web architecture, software development, open source, ruby, life