Kudos to the 37signals team for launching what looks like a nice way to get the word out about their products.
I’ve been using Basecamp for three years and it’s been a great tool for collaborating with our clients.
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Disclaimer: This is my get-rich-quick scheme for the day.
Yesterday we announced our new suite of plans for Rails Boxcar. You can now get started with a pre-configured VPS designed by Rails developers like you for as low as $59/month.
You can check out our new rates here:
If you’re at RailsConf, be sure to introduce yourself and ask for details. :-)
If you’re coming to Portland for RailsConf or CabooseConf, be sure to introduce yourself (and we’ll try to do the same). A few of us from Planet Argon will be attending the conference. I thought that I’d make it easy to spot us by putting some faces to our names.
In corner #1 we have Alex Malinovich who is our Director of Deployment Services. If you have any questions about hosting options, deployment tips, and scaling your Ruby on Rails application.. be sure to tug on his shoulder. I also overheard that he’ll be giving people discounts on our Boxcar products to those he meets in person.
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[Alex Malinovich, Director of Deployment Services]{.small}
In corner #2, we have Andy Delcambre who is on our development team. You might remember Andy from his series of blog posts/tutorials on using Git and getting Basecamp RSS feeds working in Google Reader via a Mongrel-based proxy (our team is still using this approach using this after ten months!).
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[Andy Delcambre, Software Developer]{.small}
In corner #3, we have Gary Blessington who has been leading our design and development team. If you’re looking for a job working with Ruby on Rails, be sure to introduce yourself to Gary as he’s hoping to meet up with several applicants who will be in Portland this week.
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[Gary Blessington, Director of Design and Development]{.small}
In corner #4… is me. I’m not doing any talks this year so I plan to do wander around stress-free as I’m not finishing my slides at the last minute or preparing for panel talks. I’m happy to field questions and exchange stories with you. :-)
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[Robby Russell]{.small}
We are hiring. so feel free to introduce yourself to any of the faces above.
…and most importantly, I hope you have a great time in Portland!
If you’re coming to Portland, Oregon for RailsConf 2008 or
CabooseConf… I’d like to invite you all to check out our collection of
articles that we wrote to highlight some stuff to do in town. We’ll be
posting a few more before the conference, but wanted to help you all
plan out your visit in our wonderful little city.
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Beertown](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/10/portland-revealed-episode-2-beertown)
```ruby
- [Episode 3: Get
```text
outdoors](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/11/portland-revealed-episode-3-get-outdoors)
```ruby
- [Episode 4: Stay Awake During
```text
RailsConf](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/16/portland-revealed-episode-4-stay-awake-during-railsconf)
```ruby
- [Episode 5: Places to
```text
Work](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/16/portland-revealed-episode-5-places-to-work)
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Stay tuned as we’ll be posting more over the next week.
Update. We’ve moved the Boxcar Conductor plugin for deploying Ruby on Rails applications to a new location on GitHub.
You can still submit bugs/feature requests on Lighthouse here:
Lighthouse](http://planetargon.lighthouseapp.com/projects/9962-boxcar-conductor/overview)
Enjoy!
Two years ago, I wrote an article titled, The Art of Delivery. I wanted to post a few updates based on how our process has evolved since then (and continues to).
Over the past few years, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on quite a diverse collection of projects. This has enabled us to work with many different clients and solicit feedback on our process. This has given us an opportunity to evolve a set of best practices that fulfills the long-term project goals/budgets of our client while making sure that we’re able to maintain a design and development process that is agile.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our team typically bills work per-iteration on projects rather than per-hour or a flat-bid per-project. Since iterations are bite-sized pieces of the entire project and limited to 1-2 weeks, our teams estimates are much more accurate and we’re able to keep things rolling and on track.
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The basic structure of our project looks like this.
Before we begin working on an iteration, we outline a set of goals that we want to create solutions for. This process comes out of discussions between our client and us until we agree on what is the highest value/most critical to the success of the project, based on our shared understanding of where we are today. These goals translate into Deliverables, which in a typical iteration might require Interaction Design, Interface Design, or Development. We tend to break our process up into stages so that Interaction Design on Module XYZ would be implemented in a following iteration. This is because it’s unrealistic to expect someone to provide an accurate estimate on how long it’ll take to implement something before you know how people will interact with it.
Within any given iteration, our team is spread across several sets of deliverables. As a team, we breakdown these deliverables into smaller sets of tasks. It’s our aim to keep tasks smaller than a full days worth of work as it’s much easier to measure progress across the iteration when we can track tasks at a granular level.
Essentially, tasks are the individual steps needed to achieve these goals. We don’t go out of our way to list each one of those during an estimate process as some tasks take less time than it takes to generate an estimate for them. Each person providing estimates should avoid getting too granular and aim to find a good balance that compliments their workflow.
Like most things… mileage may vary.
Through this process, we can get calculate the estimated costs for each deliverable, which then provides us an cost for the entire iteration. In addition to deliverables, we also budget a set of hours/days so that we can be compensated for handling small requests, bug fixes, and project management. It’s important to factor these things into your process.
In future posts, I’ll discuss how we’re handling this process while working on multiple projects… as that’s where it can chaos can start if you’re not careful. ;-)
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How does your team work? As we’re always evolving our process in an effort so that we can be more efficient and speed up our delivery cycle, I’d love to learn from those in the community.
We’re about to roll out some announcements for Boxcar, our professional VPS hosting solution for Ruby on Rails applications. As we roll out these new updates, we’re going to offer some extra special deals to those who are following us on twitter. :-)
If you want in on the action…
`boxcar":http://twitter.com/boxcar * "Follow `planetargon](http://twitter.com/planetargon)
As usual, we’ll be posting some announcements on our blog as well… so be sure to subscribe to our feed.
It’s been quiet here the past several weeks and that’s because for the first time since I started Planet Argon, I was able to take an extended vacation.
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My partner and I headed to France (Paris, Nice, Lascaux II, and Bordeaux) for a few weeks. It was a first time for both of us. I’ve posted some photos on my flickr (vacation set).
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I’d like to thank my amazing team for helping make it easy for me to take off for that much time. :-)
In any event, I wanted to post a few non-technical links…
([tastespotting](http://tastespotting.com) without the meat)
```ruby
- [Robby's Muxtape](http://robbyrussell.muxtape.com/)
- [Robby's Grabb.it](http://grabb.it/users/robbyrussell)
- [Robby on twitter](http://twitter.com/robbyrussell)
- [Robby's feedflix](http://feedflix.com/robbyrussell) (netflix
```text
queue/stats)
Link yours up!
In the coming weeks… I’ll be posting some more thoughts on Project Management, time management, and anything else that seems to come up. If there is anything you’d like me to write about, feel free to drop me a line with a request.
Last Friday, Greg Borenstein sent me a link to ZombieURL after it got launched. The folks at Bottlecap Labs took RubyURL and threw in Zombies… the rest you’ll have to see for yourself.
There… I warned you.
You can check out the source code for ZombieURL on GitHub
You can also grab the underlying source code for RubyURL on GitHub.
I’d love to see what other fun things people come up with to do with RubyURL.
Zack Chandler (author of the TrustCommerce gem) writes..
“How do you like Braintree? I’ve haven’t used them yet but may in the future…”
Good question. I was actually planning to write up a quick review of their exceptional service because not many people know about them yet. Now is as good of a time as any.
We’ve been using Authorize.NET for over four years as it’s what our primary banking institution hooked us up with when we began researching merchant services. However, they didn’t provide us with some of the subscription-based management features that we found with some other payment gateways and we began referring our customers to TrustCommerce. We planned to switch over to TrustCommerce with the development of Cobalt (our new billing and hosting support platform).
After we began to set milestones for going live with Cobalt, I tried to get in touch with TrustCommerce. I was provided a demo account and really wanted to get in touch with their sales department to get an application.
…a week goes by. No response. So, I tried to contact them again. No response. tried again… and (yet) again… no response. To date, I have yet to hear back from them.
This was echoed by one of our consulting clients that said, “their support staff seems real responsive, but I can’t get ahold of anyone to actually get an account.” So, I planned to start looking at other options or stick with Authorize.NET.
..and then (as if they were listening to my thoughts)… I receive an email from Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree, a payment processing company.
(snip)
“I am the founder of Braintree, a payment processing company. We provide credit card and electronic check processing, simplified PCI DSS Compliance through remote storage of credit card data, payment gateway/virtual terminal, etc. We’re a one stop shop.”
He goes on to introduce himself and explain that they’re really focused on subscription-based services, which is exactly what our new centralized billing app is handling.
So, since I hadn’t heard from TrustCommerce, I requested a demo with Braintree. We were able to take advantage of the hard work that has put into the ActiveMerchant project, which already works with Braintree. So, our application that we’d been focusing on integrating with TrustCommerce was just a few lines of code away from working with Braintree.
While I’m sure that many people have had great experiences with TrustCommerce (as I did when I worked with their support team while working client projects)… not being able to order an account isn’t doing them any favors.
So, we just launched and now running Cobalt with Braintree as our backend for managing recurring credit card processing. Their customer support has been great so far. In one case, I messed up some security settings and locked myself out and after they saw that I had failed to login a few times, I received a call from one of their support people. I didn’t prompt it… they took the initiative to call me. She said she’d look into it and called me back when she figured out what I had done wrong. :-)
On Monday afternoon, after I announced that we launched Cobalt on my blog, I got a congratulations from another of their developers who congratulated us and wished us the best of success.
So… Zack. To answer your question, “How do you like Braintree?”
My answer is… I think they’re fantastic so far. Their web interface for managing your account could use a few IxD eyes, but we like that it’s minimal and most importantly… the core functions of their product appear to be working great. Our team has now talked to roughly 5-6 different team members at Braintree and have nothing but great things to say about those interactions. Great customer service that definitely seems to echo that they want their customers to be successful and are here to do what they can to provide us with the tools we need to fulfill our goals.
I only wish that we had the same service from all of our vendors.
Bryan, thanks for introducing yourself. You have a great team.
Toe](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/02/13/be-careful-that-you-dont-stub-your-big-toe)
In a previous post, I showed how we’ve been working on an interactive deployment process for Rails applications to reduce the time it takes to deploy to a Boxcar.
We began to move our Boxcar deployment recipes into it’s own Rails plugin and just made it available on GitHub.
The Boxcar Conductor plugin aims to automate the entire process for deploying to your Boxcar. We’re down to just a few simple commands to run to get your application up and running. While mileage may vary with other hosting providers, we did want to open up this work to the community and centralize our work with the community of Boxcar customers who have helped us build and test these tools.
If you’re running on Edge Rails… you can take advantage of the new support for installing plugins in git repositories.
We’ve been designing and developing a new centralized billing platform over the past few months and late last week, we launched it! Along with this new billing platform, we launched another new application, Cobalt, which is a new account management and support tool for our hosting customers.
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We’ll be migrating all of our past customers over to this new system in time, but are initially using it for new Boxcar customers.
We’ve been building the new system to use Braintree as our new credit card payment gateway. With this switch, we’re also introducing monthly subscription rates for Boxcar, which means that you can try it out month-to-month now.
Over the next few weeks/months, we’ll be announcing several features to Cobalt that will ease your Rails deployment experience.
I want to thank all those on my team that helped get these new applications up and running.
If you’re looking for professional VPS-based Rails hosting, hop on our train by ordering a Boxcar today for $99/month!
For more information, visit railsboxcar.com or Planet Argon.
Also, be sure to follow Boxcar on twitter.