Happy new year from the ADS Crew!

Running a small business is hard. Add on top of that pursuit of an MBA, coordinating a tech conference, writing articles for Amazon Web Services, being a tech reviewer, going to Scrum and Ruby user groups, holding a monthly Scrum lunch and learn, writing two monthly newsletters, writing blog posts, working with consultants, working on improving our applications, and most importantly being a husband and father, a guy can get pretty tired.

Work/life balance? What is that? What does that mean? Does it mean the same thing to a CEO of a large company as it does to a guy like me? Does the fact that I define my success and failure by the success and failure of my company impact that balance?

If I didn’t have the full support of my wife Kookkai things would be much different. If I didn’t have the ability to spend time with my daughter Palamee at any time of the day, things would be much different. If I couldn’t take a moment and play with my dog Lilo, things would be much different. For some, working from home is a challenge. For me, it helps me deal with the insanity that is my schedule. It is a constant reminder of what’s important, and to keep it simple.

I look at multitasking and context switching right in their faces and laugh.

Luckily, I have yet to encounter the mythical straw.

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Happy new year from the entire ADS Crew!

I have (happily) been using NetNewsWire for my 200 RSS feeds for many months. One thing I felt was missing was the ability to share links with my friends and anyone else that is interested. I have now made the switch to Google Reader, imported my 200 feeds from NetNewsWire, and am happily reading my feeds online. If you are interested in items that I might share (and I will start doing that right away) take a look. If you have any great blogs that I should definitely be checking out, whether they cover any aspect of technology or business, please let me know and I will add them to my reader and share the goodness.

Happy Holidays to everyone from ADS. We hope that 2007 was a great year for everyone, and look forward to a great 2008!

On July 22nd we posted a help wanted video on StandoutJobs.com. A few days later, one developer answered the call in the most unique way that we have seen yet, with a video of his own. That developer is the newest member of the Atlantic Dominion Solutions team – Lyric Lee Hartley.

About Lyric
Lyric Lee Hartley is a programmer, open source advocate, agile/GTD/Getting Real evangelist, philosopher, music lover, father and general seeker of “the good”. He loves and strives for beauty and simplicity in his personal and professional life. It is that pursuit that has led him to Ruby and Rails, and has brought him to ADS. He is passionate about what he does, interested to learn about what he does not, and maintains a healthy curiosity about all aspects of the world. Lyric’s background includes Rails, Perl, Flash and a lot of Linux.

In his keynote presentation on day one of RailsConf Europe, Dave Thomas mentioned something that I am hearing at every Ruby and Rails conference I attend – understand the customer, figure out what they really want, and satisfy their needs. More than a few speakers at RailsConf 2007 and the Ruby Hoedown also discussed this. In my position as Project Director of Atlantic Dominion Solutions (ADS) I am the main point of contact for all of our customers. I handle sales, marketing, project management, and backup our development team from time to time. So to me, the idea of keeping clients happy is an obvious one. However, it is continuously pounded into us, which of course, is a good thing. It led me to wonder however, if developers are taught basic project management or communication skills, especially when they might be asked to discuss a feature or another aspect of a project with a customer. So, I started asking people two questions: if they had a degree in computer science (CS), and if so, did they ever take any project management or communications classes. In short, the answer was no.

I’m finishing up my CS degree at Rollins and can honestly say that the curriculum is about ninety-nine percent programming with a dash of “dealing with people” thrown in. Until Senior Project, I hadn’t really heard anything about keep clients happy. Requirements were of course discussed, but that was the extent of it. I spoke with Oliver Schmelzle from FiveRuns. He received his degree in Germany. Again, it was 100% programming with an emphasis on research. Everyone else I talked with said the same thing. So, I switched gears and asked the recruiters.

Ben Yoskovitz of Standout Jobs said that some employers are asking for developers to have project management and communications skills, and added, “I’d say communication is critical. Project management less so, but any coder that isn’t capable of being well organized and managing their own time is going to be in trouble.” When I asked Brian Mariani of mirRoR Placement the same question. He told me, “I’m not sure if more developers are required to have PM skills, but web 2.0 development technologies have led to increased number of developers who do have these skills, a pleasant surprise for employers.” Interesting no?

I had a conversation with a CTO of a large development firm while at RailsConf Europe who told me that ultimately, if their customer isn’t happy, then regardless of the project being on time and according to spec, they have not succeeded. Customer happiness is job number one. Communication is key. Talk with your customer, listen to them, find out what they really want, and then deliver it.

Additional links

• Rob’s Project Management Presentation from BarCampOrlando
• Developer skills outlook 2007: What training do you need? – builder.au

No one has commented on this yet but I figured I would take a moment to comment on it myself. When the ADS website was in “1.0″ we had the site designed in PHP. This was when we were a network services company. Times changed and so did our site. We didn’t change the platform of the site though as there wasn’t too much of a point in doing so.

We have been developing Ruby on Rails sites for almost two years now, so why are both our site and blog still on PHP?

When we have a client that comes to us looking at potentially moving their site to Rails we ask them why. If they don’t say something along the lines of “managing my site is getting out of hand” or “our site is old and we want something newer and better” (I heard this today) then we tell them they might just want to stick with what they have. If it ain’t broke, don’t break it. Moving from one platform to another is never a simple matter, and can be costly depending on the complexity.

Before someone flames me for saying so, I am all for moving sites of all flavors to Rails. We can help with that. But before taking the plunge, you have to ask is it worth it. Usually it is.

So, in that light, I am happy to announce that ADS is in the process of moving our entire site, blog and all, to Ruby on Rails. This comes along with a major update to our site that is currently being developed. In a month or two you will see a nice clean site that is 100% Rails goodness.

We look forward to it. Represent!

I’ll be your friend. You can find me all over the Internet. Here are the links:

Pownce :: http://pownce.com/robertdempsey/
LinkedIn :: http://www.linkedin.com/in/techcfl
Facebook :: Look me up – Robert Dempsey
Twitter :: http://twitter.com/rdempsey

Should I be anywhere else? Where do you all hang online?

We’re working on a set of free informational materials and are wondering what method people prefer when gathering information online. Help us decide how to serve it up with our little poll where we ask…