This past week (give or take a few days), the Rails Business group has covered a lot of topics, that might be of interest to you, should you be running a business and using Ruby on Rails. Many of the members of the new group are independent contractors and have been very open in sharing their experiences of working for themselves. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few conversations and tips that were covered this past week.

Health Coverage

Mike Pence started a conversation about health coverage…

“Has anyone else found the medical insurance issue to be a show stopper for them? Are you one doctor visit and diagnosis away from financial ruin? I can tell you firsthand that wishful thinking won’t pay those bills…”

This started a discussion about how people are able to work on their own and maintain health coverage, which is definitely not something that should be considered lightly. Read more…

Client Expenses

Another great question was raised by Mike Breen.

“I’m going to start work on my first project that will require me to travel. How should I handle the expenses? Do I build the costs into the contract price or do I submit the expenses to the client for reimbursements? Or does this vary from client to client based on the company policy?”

The responses included links to IRS sites and sections of other peoples’ contracts. Read more.

Hosting Client Repositories

Where do you host your client’s source code repositories? Are you managing it all yourself on your own servers or using a service?

The discussion (so far) has lead us to evaluate our own solution for this at PLANET ARGON. It appears that everyone has different concerns about how they want to manage client code during the development cycle.

For example, do you allow your client access to trunk/ if they aren’t all paid up yet?

Also, it seems like there are a bunch of new commercial options coming out (and are built on Rails). Read more.

Naming Your Business

Jared Haworth writes,

“For those of you who are working as ‘independent developers,’ have you found that it makes more sense to simply do business under your own name, for example “Jared Haworth L.L.C.,” or to come up with a clever business name instead, such as “Code Fusion Studios”?”

This was a good conversation to follow and definitely raised a lot of great questions and things to consider in response to the original message. Read more.

Other Topics

• Magazines, what business magazines do you read?
• Where do you find gigs?

Join the Community!

The community is still only a few weeks old and we’re already approach 350 members! It’s been a great learning about other peoples’ experiences… as well as sharing what I’ve learned since I started PLANET ARGON (and how the name came to be).

If you hadn’t had a chance to join, stop by and introduce yourself!

So, I was trying to send AT&T wireless a support email through their online system and got stuck at the following screen.

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Come on guys… you can design a better form than this… and I’m now going to have to try and sneak in a question under a sub-topic that doesn’t apply to my question… just so I can send you an email?

Getting help shouldn’t be so hard[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1 .footnote-ref role=”doc-noteref”}.

1. ::: {#fn1}

At least I can **Print this page** and show all my
friends...[↩︎](#fnref1){.footnote-back role="doc-backlink"}
:::

In an article on FastCompany.com, Lynne d Johnson writes..

“I’ve been a paid subscriber of last.fm since 2005, and over the course of time”

I’m confused… since when did you have to pay for a subscription to last.fm?

Read the article, What will CBS do with Last.FM

I’ve been using it for much over two years and passed the 31k song mark recently. I am curious about what CBS plans to with it…

It’s been a week since I announced the new Ruby on Rails meets the business world group. Already, the group attracted over 300 members from around the globe… from Argentina, Boston, Australia, Florida, Seattle, Portland!, the Netherlands, and South Africa.

We’ve already seen some great topics come up… from:

• Project estimates
• Fixed bids versus time and materials
• Pricing
• Handling code ownership with client contracts
• Incorporating (LLC, S CORP?)
• Managing money/accounting
• Contracts

I expect that many of these topics will resurface and there has been a lot of valuable information passed around. It’s exciting to see that so many people not only want to use Ruby on Rails as a platform of choice for their business ventures, but they’re also willing to share their personal experiences and knowledge to help others move into this space.

If you’re running a business that focuses on Ruby on Rails or just considering it, you should stop by and introduce yourself.

update: membership grew from 200 to over 300 in the past day!

Several weeks ago, I announced that I will be speaking at Ostrava on Rails and had begun working on my presentation for “The Case for Rails.”

Unfortunately, there seemed to be some miscommunication within the management of the conference organizers and I will no longer be heading to Czech Republic for Ostrava on Rails.

I’d like to thank everyone who emailed me with advice on where to stay before/during/after the conference and in Prague. I really appreciated that and hope that everyone who makes it to the conference has a good time!

In an effort to increase awareness of the importance of good Interaction and Interface Design in Web Development… I suggested that today be. Hug Your Designer Day.

Designers Versus Developers

Are you seeing a lot of this in your Design and Development teams?

/>[Allison Beckwith, Experience Director and Graeme Nelson, Lead Architect]{.small}

Happy Designers and Happy Developers

Well, maybe it’s time that your developers gave your designers a hug…

/>[Alain Bloch, Web Developer and Chris Griffin, User Interface Designer]{.small}

Also… to celebrate Hug Your Designer Day, Amy Hoy was kind enough to post her slides and some audio that I recorded of her talk at RailsConf 07.

Let’s all take a moment to thank the designers who put the experience of the users first. The success of our projects rely on everyone working together. Hug Your Designer! (they might hug back…)

Amy Hoy, of slash7 fame, gave a talk titled, “ Rubber, Meet Road: Getting Designers Running with Rails”:http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/rails2007/view/e_sess/11632, which provided a good overview of some of the problems that designers and developers face when working together. This was one of my favorite talks, because she essentially explained several of the problems that our team has faced in the past and in many ways, still encounter from time to time. A few things that I was surprised to hear, was that several companies leave their developers to implement HTML/CSS in the Rails applications, rather than let their designers into the area. Some teams, provide a directory in public/ for their designers to write their HTML/CSS. Amy said that she preferred to work in the standard view directories (as a designer), which is exactly how our team works.

In fact, I agreed with Amy on several points.

• Developers say, “We can’t do that” too often, when really… we

mean, "We won't/don't want to) do that"
```text
-   Template languages create extra barriers to training designers.
```text
Stick with RHTML... designers won't be afraid of ERb syntax if you
sit down with them and explain some of it. Move the ugly stuff to
helpers... like you should be anyways!
```text
-   Teach your designers how to use subversion... let them break it
```text
first and then help them... they'll love you for it
```text
-   When meeting clients with a designer and a developer... don't let
```text
the developer speak too much about implementation when it hasn't
been designed yet. Interaction Design should dictate architecture
not vice-versa.

“Stop, Collaborate, and Listen” — Vanilla Ice

I’d like to personally thank Amy for being a diplomatic designer and telling the hundreds of developers that showed up for her talk to remember that designers and developers… think differently… and that’s a good thing for the application and ultimately… the user experience.

Having said that, I’d like to request that tomorrow, May 23rd, be… Hug Your Designer Day.

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of being up in front of several hundred people with the following individuals on the the Business of Rails panel at RailsConf.

/>
[Photo by James Duncan Davidson]{.small}

Moderated by:

• Nathaniel Talbott, President, Terralien, Inc.

The Victims:

• Justin Gehtland, Founding Partner, Relevance
• Geoffrey Grosenbach, Topfunky
• Andre Lewis, Earthcode Studios
• Joe O’Brien, artisan, EdgeCase, LLC
• Robby Russell, Director, PLANET ARGON

Overall, the experience was fantastic. I really enjoyed the questions that Nathaniel and the audience threw our direction, both during and after the session. Throughout the remainder of the conference, people would catch me and present complicated business questions to me and ask for my input. I think that I even helped one guy make his final decision about which job offer he was going to accept (btw, did you decide yet?). It’s always great to share my experiences of leaving my last full-time job (3+ years ago), moving to Rails exclusively (2+ years ago), how Allison and I went from two people in an attic to seven people in an attic in about a month… to having an office in downtown Portland and clients around the globe. I’m also always happy to share my not-so-happy experiences throughout the past few years as well. Running a business is hard stuff as it comes with a whole lot of responsibility, which can lead to stress. It was great to know that the rest of the panel has had their difficult experiences. While Rails makes everything feel easy… running a business is a whole different spectrum of challenges. ;-)

At one point during the session the audience was asked, “How many of you are considering starting your own business based on Ruby on Rails?”

The response?

Based off of my extremely scientific calculations (looking around the room), I’d estimate that around 30-40% of the audience raised their hands! Wow. It was fantastic to see that there was that much interest in people starting venturing off onto their own. Imagine… a flood of new companies, competing directly with us… and guess what? I think that’s awesome! Awesome for Rails. Awesome for future startups. Awesome for everyone!

Let’s face it. Rails isn’t going anywhere for a long time.

So, now that the conference is over, questions have begun to appear in my email box. Thank you all for writing. What if you could have a sounding board to throw questions to on a regular basis? Unfortunately, our session only lasted a hour at RailsConf and too many questions weren’t gotten to. Well, I’ve asked the rest of those on the Business of Rails panel to join me on a google group, titled, Ruby on Rails meets the Business World.

If you’re looking to (A) start your own Rails-based business, (B) already run your own Rails-based business, or (©) have business experience that you’d like to share with those in camp A and B… then join the community and start some conversations.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to learning from you all and hope that my experience of co-founding and leading PLANET ARGON can be of benefit to all of you.

/>
[Photo by James Duncan Davidson]{.small}

Josh Knowles just mentioned an article written by David Chelminsky, titled, an introduction to RSpec - Part I. In this article, David introduces you to some of the new language that appeared in some of the recent versions of RSpec as well as give you a complete tutorial on building some specs.

Last night, I had the opportunity to sit down with Aslak Hellesøy and David Chelimsky for a few hours and talk about my experiences of using RSpec at PLANET ARGON and how it’s helped us redefine and evolve our process. In particular, how RSpec has helped us reshape our process of gathering user interaction specifications from our Interaction Design team and business rules from our clients.

If you’re in town and are using RSpec… or are thinking about using RSpec… and see these guys… thank them for all the hard work that they’re doing… and of course, if you run into anybody else on the team.. do the same. :-)

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[Aslak Hellesøy and David Chelimsky]{.small}

Also, by the end of the conference. Graeme and I are hoping to have a small project done to help encourage more adoption of Behavior-Driven Development

Yay! It’s almost conference time… and I’m almost completely thrilled!

Why am I not more thrilled? Well, mainly because RailsConf is being hosted here in Portland, which means that I don’t get to travel by train like we did last year via The Argon Express. (ah… the memories)

One perk of being here already… is that I get to act as a tour guide to visitors. For example, earlier today… Josh Susser (hasmanyjosh) joined Graeme and I for lunch in downtown Portland, OR. It was exciting to hear about how he and his fellow Rubyists at Powerset are using Ruby and Rails for various projects. John also spent a few minutes introducing us to Merb, which some people think will become popular in near future. We’re expecting more visitors to come by the offices over the next few days.

{width=”500” height=”333”}

If you’re in Portland already (Wednesday)… you might head over to the Lucky Lab for a game of Werewolf, which I believe Michael Buffington is organizing the event. I’m going to try to make it… maybe I’ll see you there!

Flickr Group

I created a flickr group named RailsConf 2007, and started to use the tag railsconf2007 for flickr photos. I look forward to seeing all your photos from the event!

IRC Channel

As of this afternoon, there are almost 20 people hanging out in #railsconf on freenode. Stop by and introduce yourself!

Portland Revealed

If you haven’t already subscribed to our feed, you might have missed that the PLANET ARGON team has been posting several articles about things to do, see, and drink in Portland during your visit to RailsConf. Here are a few that we’ve posted so far.

• [Portland Revealed: Episode 2:

Beertown](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/10/portland-revealed-episode-2-beertown)
```ruby
-   [Portland Revealed: Episode 3: Get
```text
outdoors](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/11/portland-revealed-episode-3-get-outdoors)
```ruby
-   [Portland Revealed: Episode 4: Stay Awake During
```text
RailsConf](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/16/portland-revealed-episode-4-stay-awake-during-railsconf)
```ruby
-   [Portland Revealed: Episode 5: Places to
```text
Work](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/5/16/portland-revealed-episode-5-places-to-work)

• More coming soon!

You can also peak around GoSeeOregon (a Rails application!) to find places around town to go see.

The team at PLANET ARGON is continuing a series of blog posts for all of you who are coming to Portland, Oregon for RailsConf 2007. Allison just posted Portland Revealed: Episode 2: Beertown, which provides a list of places to get good beer in Portland… starting at the PDX Airport to other places around the conference center. We even through in a platial map to make the beer hunt easier for you. :-)

• [View all Portland Revealed

articles](http://blog.planetargon.com/portland-revealed)

Just a quick note to those who are waiting to hear back from me about meeting up during/around RailsConf. I’m finally catching up on some of the work that got set back when I recently got sick. If you’re interested in meeting up during/around RailsConf and haven’t already written, you can email me.

There are a few other updates that were mentioned here. one of which is that I’m in the process of drafting a series of articles about the business case for rails, which will correspond with my talk at Ostrava on Rails.

In other news, our team is wrapping up a few big design and development projects and are accepting new project inquiries again for future work. Feel free to contact us to discuss your project with our talented team.