Robby on Rails

Allison Beckwith forwarded me an email that she got from Powells.com (our favorite independent bookstore)... check out their top technical books right now!

TECH BESTSELLERS

1. “The Ruby Cookbook” by Lucas Carlson (Computer Languages)
2. “Agile Web Development with Rails” by Dave Thomas (Computer Languages)
3. “Ubuntu Hacks” by Jonathan Oxer (Unix)
4. “Programming Ruby” by Dave Thomas (Computer Languages)
5. “Rails Recipes” by Chad Fowler (Computer Languages)
6. “Perl Hacks” by chromatic (Computer Languages)
7. “Higher-Order Perl” by Mark Jason Dominus (Computer Languages)
8. “Mind Performance Hacks” by Ron Hale-Evans (Popular Science)
9. “Mind Hacks” by Tom Stafford (Popular Science)
10. “Ajax Design Patterns” by Michael Mahemoff (Internet)

This includes both online and in-store purchases. We’re lucky at PLANET ARGON as we’re only about 4 blocks from their technical book store. ;-)

You’ll also notice that the Ruby books are selling more than the Perl books… Tim O’Reilly “blogged about this the other day.

Congrats on hitting #1 Lucas!

• mental note: ...better hurry and finish my book!

One of the things that we aim to do at PLANET ARGON is keep a sense of transparency between you… whether you be a client, community members, readers, or voyeurs. For those of you who don’t hang out all day in our live chat channel… you might not know who is behind the curtain. I’d like to take a moment to list some random facts related to PLANET ARGON in a series titled, “Knowing Me, Knowing You¹.” a-haa!

Did You Know?

• 50% of the employees at PLANET ARGON are vegetarians! (can you guess who?)
• 50% of the employees at PLANET ARGON are originally from Oregon. (can you guess who?)
• Andrew claims to have beaten minesweeper on expert in 112 seconds!
• Nicole was an exchange student in Switzerland for a year.
• Brian is currently majoring in Mathematics.
• Jeremy skipped the first grade.
• Robby dropped out of high school when he was 16.
• Allison built her first web page on Prodigy at age 14, it was called Allie’s in Wonderland. (sorry, no internet archives!)
• David says he has three piercings... but I’ve only seen one. o.0
• Daniel was a sea scout and got the nickname OB, which was short for OBservant.
• ...to be continued.

Your Turn!

Send me an email and share some random facts and I’ll select a few to mention on my next installment of Knowing Me, Knowing You.

¹ Named after the BBC show, Alan Partridge – Knowing Me, Knowing You

I wanted to post a quick udpate on the status of Project Borat, which we started working on just over three months ago. The reason we hadn’t been blogging about it was because the client’s business plan was going under a rewrite and they decided to pull the plug on it for now.

So, we’ve decided to pick another one of our new client projects to blog about about.

I just wanted to thank Peat and Brian for helping with this little blogging experiment… and look forward to announcing the next one by the end of the week. :-)

Goodbye, Borat!

Quick update on what’s going on at PLANET ARGON. Starting today, we are adding two more talented individuals to our Core Team. Neither of them are active bloggers yet, but if you want to meet them… you can stop by our IRC channel and say hi!

I would like to introduce Daniel Johnson, who will be joining the Rails Hosting and support side of the business. I’ve personally known him for a few years as a member of PDXLUG, a Portland Linux User Group that I helped start almost four years ago. You might keep an eye on his blog over the next few weeks… :-)

Jumping into the Rails development arena here at PLANET ARGON is Andrew Grim, who has been one of our satellite developers (contractors) for the past month. We liked him so much that we just had to offer him a full-time position.

...and if you’re considering moving to beautiful Portland, Oregon, we’re still looking for a few more people. ;-)