Alan Cooper, author of About Face, has slides from his presentation at Agile 2008 online.
If anybody knows if there is video of this talk, please let me know. :-)
Here are a few skitches from the slideshow.
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If you’re in the market for a new hosting provider for your Ruby on Rails application, you might take a look at the new options for Rails Boxcar. We recently expanded our service offerings into three pricing tiers as well as custom packages for those who need a bit more.
A few things that we’ve recently added support for:
- Allows us to keep your server even more secure by avoiding
sending passwords over the net
- Other fun features related to this coming soon
```bash
- Auto-configured Nginx w/Mongrel cluster
- Phusion Passenger (**mod_rails**) support! (for those with
```text
mixed-environments)
```text
- Continued development of [Boxcar
```text
Conductor](http://github.com/planetargon/boxcar-conductor/tree/master))
The best part is that we can get you up and running with a new Boxcar now for as low as $59/month USD.
For more information, visit: http://railsboxcar.com
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.
It’s been quiet because I’ve been busy over the past few months. Projects, vacations, and pair programming with our new developer, Nigel. ;-)
In other news, Chris and I launched http://ohmyscience.org (on twitter) in an effort to get a small one-night micro-project out the door.
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I have a growing list of a few micro-projects that I hope to be helping get developed and launched before the summer is over. Stay tuned!
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I hope that you’re all enjoying your summer!
After noticing a few patch requests on Rubyforge.. I decided that I’d put the ShortURL gem up on GitHub as I spend quite a bit of my time there these days. :-)
I’ve also thrown up a few lines of code so that you can get the gist of the gem. ;-)
It appears that MacPorts has upgraded to Ruby 1.8.7, which is good news if you’re running Rails 2.1… but if you have an older Rails application… it’s not going to work too well.
In order to get Ruby 1.8.6 installed with the latest MacPorts, you’ll need to do the following.
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.
Alex Malinovich, Director of Deployment Services
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!).
Andy Delcambre, Software Developer
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.
Gary Blessington, Director of Design and Development
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. :-)
Robby Russell
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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.