ADS specializes in using Ruby on Rails to build advanced, scalable, database-backed web sites for organizations of all sizes. Find out more at our website.

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

That phrase is something I heard on a cartoon when I was a kid. It is still relevant today, and something that Brion Vibber can relate to. Last night at the Orlando Java Users Group it was standing room only to hear the Wikipedia CTO talk.

Wikipedia is a incorporated, 501(c)(3) not for profit organization, that runs one of the most popular websites on the Internet, with an average of 32,000 hits per second. They run this incredible site with 300 hundred servers, 3 data centers, a technical staff of four (that’s right, four), and the open source LAMP stack. At the core of Wikipedia is MediaWiki, an open source package you can use for your projects. Add to that Lucene, a powerful Java based search engine (that we Rails folks can utilize too), a number of caching packages including Squid, APC and memcache, MySQL replication, geographic DNS and a whole lot of technical expertise and voila, Wikipedia.

Frankly, I was blown away by the sheer scale of it all, and their total utilization of every machine under their control, all with a $1 million per year budget. Nothing sits idle. Web servers are also memcache servers, and storage is distributed throughout the farm. A few tricks that I picked up were:

• Applying schema updates to the slave databases first, and then swap out the masters
• Divide database servers into groups
• Split data along functional boundaries (they use language)

It was a great time. A big thanks goes out to Mike Levin for brining Brion over for an excellent talk.

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…

There is no luck.

For my History of Rock and Roll class at Rollins our teacher, Chuck Archard, invited Riff West to come and talk with us. Riff West was a bass player in Molly Hatchet and Foghat, two extremely successful bands. Aside from great stories and insight into the music industry, Riff told us the story of when he met Gene Simmons of KISS. He exclaimed to Gene how lucky he and KISS were. Gene (supposedly) got a little upset and said that there is no luck. “Luck”, said Gene, “is where preparation meets opportunity” (loosely quoted).

There is no luck.

Work hard, do what you love, and be prepared when opportunity comes your way. If you are prepared, you can take advantage of it.

There is no luck.

- Robert Dempsey

I awoke this morning to find two unactivated iPhones . I quickly found out that silly me had not given AT&T the proper account information to port my numbers over. Once they had the correct info, I was told that the phones would be good to go within three hours. Five hours later all was not well. I placed another call to AT&T tech support, and had to hang up after 45 minutes of no results, and being told that somehow my activation of two phones signed me up for two calling plans. We got that resolved and I went on to other things. I received a voice mail a little later saying that everything was well. My iPhone told me otherwise.

Long story short, I spent about two more hours this evening with tech support and got the phones working. Ultimately, the issue was that the activation didn’t process in the AT&T system correctly.

I am now a happy man, syncing contacts, calendar, Gmail and more. I do have to give it to the support folks at AT&T. They stuck it out with me and did a lot of troubleshooting. We got the problem solved and life is good. Ah…oneness.