After listening to this weeks Ruby on Rails podcast where Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed Bruce Tate, it got me to thinking about why Ruby on Rails appeals to me. For me as a Java person, the real appeal of Ruby lies in Rails and here’s why: (more…)
A great book I read recently from the Pragmatic Programmers is Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is either a manager or executive or aspiring to some form of a team leadership role! It lays out the day to day with a very realistic technical leadership role in an example company. It also shows how to apply some XP style planning to the prioritization and release planning process with a medium sized team.
My only complaint with the book is one sentence where they recommend feature boxed over time boxed releases which I generally disagree with.
As a technology manager a big part of what I do is trying to help people do their jobs well. That includes removing obstacles, being an advocate when there is a problem, making sure the team is operating efficiently, ensuring people can usually work a normal day without overtime, and overall making sure they are happy and enthusiastic in their job.
Part of that process involves doing performance reviews to check-in a few times a year, get feedback from their colleagues, give raises (more…)
There are pros and cons to both approaches:
1. Feature boxed releases allow you to focus on getting the features the business side needs in the release and getting them right. However feature boxing is more easily prone to scope creep, continually pushing the release date, and spending too much time getting a feature “just” right instead of getting it in front of customers.
2. Time boxed iterations continuously keep the organization focusing on what’s most important (more…)
I live in San Francisco and work as a consultant to Common Sense Media and Greatschools.
I stopped working full-time back in October of 2007 so we could take 8 months off and sail down to Mexico. And no, I'm not a dot com millionaire that's retired, I still need to work for a living.
Our boat is in Mexico right now and we'll be going down for another 6 months starting in February of 2009. When we get back in August of 2009 I'll start looking for another full-time CTO job.
I use DreamHost for hosting Ruby on Rails and PHP based sites. They are a mixed bag as all shared hosting providers are but for the price they can't be beat. If you choose to signup use promo code GABRITO to save $50 on your first year.
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