My Professional Blog

As many of you know, I’m looking for employment now while my Nokia days come to an end. I thought I would post some thoughts on how you find a job in the current job market. Nevermind that I don’t have a job, I just started looking in earnest a couple of days ago. So here goes:

The first thing to get straight is that YOU are the product. Prospective employers are your customers. And as a result, you need a marketing plan. Your marketing plan must begin with the usual self-assessments which eventually lead to your main marketing vehicle — the resume. In some ways, you could almost consider your resume as the product.

Next comes the distribution problem. How do you get your resume in front of those who you wish to become your buyers? In today’s world, you get your resume and profile up on all the job boards that are relevant to your profession. However, reentering the same data over and over is such a pain. To ease your pain, use SimplyHired which is a site that will enable you to enter your resume data once and then blast it out to sites of your choosing — a real time saver. Just be sure that you get the information right because after SimplyHired does its thing, you will have to manage individual accounts at all the sites.

As an added touch, I created my own website to promote my efforts. The website serves as a visual reinforcement of my technical skills. Its well-designed, uses semantic standards-based markup, is CSS-based, and uses progressive enhancement in a couple areas to improve the user experience (printing, tag cloud AJAX). Its not an over-the-top tour de force in technology, but is just enough to impress the target audience — prospective employers and recruiters. Because some of you will go there, I readily disclaim that its been soft-launched. Expect to find minor cross-browser issue and some content yet to be provided. You techies are a tougher audience than my target audience!

So when you flip the switch on this machine, you will get assaulted with emails and opportunities. These are your customers banging on the door. To organize yourself, get a Highrise account from 37Signals. Highrise is a mini-CRM application and let’s face it, you will be talking to people, exchanging email with people, and more or less manage the sales process. Highrise is perfect for this and is free for limited use.

Once you actually start interacting with people you’ll have to get pretty savvy at determining who to spend your time with. I have received very generic requests to call recruiters and I don’t get involved further unless I am able to get a compelling story up front. Be prepared, you will also hear from people who will disregard your skills, experience, and relocation preferences entirely. I am deleting most emails on that basis alone.

So far, things are going well. I think that treating this situation like a product campaign has been beneficial. I already have some solid leads and opportunities that I’m following up on. And this is Day 3.

As we speak, I’m now probably 7 minutes into rebooting my Rails container. Why? Because all my apps went down and won’t restart and that’s the only thing I can think of to do. Why is it taking so long? Your guess is as good as mine.

They do seem to be able to keep my blog up, but even the initial admin page came up without a stylesheet. I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but something is definitely wrong. I’m not sure if I’m alone on this, but I’m definitely going to perform a Technorati search to see if anyone else is having trouble.

I am not running mission-critical apps here. Nor am I running high traffic sites. If I were, I’d be either losing money or losing credibility or both. If you have a site where either of those are concerns, I’m forced to recommend that you don’t host it at Media Temple. At least, not in the Rails containers. They clearly do not have that technology figured out yet.

10+ minutes and still rebooting the container.

I’d also like to add that support seems pretty spotty as well. Its likely that you’ll get a quick initial response, but it may not be well-considered or thorough. After you respond again, there’s a longer wait for the next reply. One of my tickets is on its fourth iteration and they finally directed me to a page full of support links. I don’t really call that “support”.

So it looks like this weekend I’ll be finding a new host for my Rails apps. Here’s hoping this post saves others some money. I have a reservation into Slicehost, but there’s a waiting list there. Looks like I may have to bite the bullet and pay more than I wanted to and use someone like RailsMachine.

Up after 20 minutes, but the container still shows its rebooting. Not acceptable.

I have subscribed to Why the Lucky Stiff’s Redhanded blog for quite some time, but lately I’ve been unable to fight through the distractions.  I present to you his latest performance.  Is anyone else wishing he’d kill the noise, so that we can all learn from him?

I’m pretty sure that I sound like a Father telling his kid to turn the music down…and so at least I am self-aware.

Its probably because I come from the Java world that I felt compelled to create an app configuration mechanism which enabled easy externalization of app properties.  This is not an Earth-shattering, whiz-bang plugin, so I’m not going to oversell it.  Quite simply, this plugin just enables you to put properties into an app.yml file and manage it nicely with Capistrano.  So maybe this’ll save you 10 minutes of coding.  Here goes:

FEATURE SUMMARY

This plugin provides for easy externalized configurization in a YML file:

• Common and environment-specific configuration contained in a single YML file.
• Capistrano task to preserve configuration file from release to release.

USAGE
Place configuration elements common to all environments in the common area as demonstrated below:

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# Configuration for ALL environments.
common: &common
  app_name: your_app_name_here

Place environment-specific elements under appropriate environment as shown below:

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# Configuration for PRODUCTION environment.
production:
  <<: *common
  google_api: some_long_api_key_here

To obtain the values from anywhere in your code, simply access the attributes of the environment like so:

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puts AppConfig.app_name
puts AppConfig.google_api

DEPLOYMENT

To preserve the configuration values across releases, call the symlink_app_config task from within the after_update_code task.

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task :after_update_code, :roles => :app do
  symlink_app_config
end

To update the app.yml file for the first time or for subsequent times, the task update_app_config can be used as below:

cap update_app_config

This takes the app.yml file from the config directory of the application and uploads it to the release path on the server.

You can get it here:

script/plugin install http://dev.billeisenhauer.com/svn/projects/plugins/appconfig

Hope someone finds this useful.

Today I woke up to find that every single one of my Rails apps hosted at Media Temple were down and would not restart.  I received no notifications whatsoever and am somewhat baffled as to why this is the case.

I am actively coding on one app, but the other two are pretty much unchanged.  As such, I don’t believe there’s anything that I’ve done to cause this.

I do have the 64MB container, so I know I’d be pushing the limits if they all were popular.  The fact is, I actually have only two of the three up at any given time, so I thought I could squeeze in within that smallish container.  Upgrading to the next bigger size is something that I have not wanted to do because I haven’t felt completely comfortable since Day One.

Anyone else have experiences to share with Media Temple?  I’m about to pack up my toys and go play somewhere else.  I was seduced by the Grid Container concept, but I am about ready to declare that it may not be ready for prime time — and its not like I’m doing much here either!

advrailsdallas_5

Originally uploaded by pragdave.

This past week I attended the Advanced Rails Studio in Dallas and had a fabulous time. The picture you see is from our lunch outside on Friday — I am in mid-gesture at the near table on the left.

If you have the opportunity to go to one of these studios, I think you’ll both benefit and enjoy it at the same time. The Rails Community is filled with a smart and optimistic bunch of people who are very fun to be around.

The Studio itself was run with amazing attention to detail. I can tell you that I was very well-fed and not just with bottom-feeding food, either. Kudos to Mike and Nicole for making the logistics so automatic.

Unlike my experience at the basic Studio back in January 2006, this one involved much more discussion and debate. Just imagine 40+ knowledgeable developers getting together to share experiences. Of course, there were class notes, but these served mostly as enablements for discussion. Often, the value of the section was not in the notes, but in the discussion.

I do find that I generally am well-versed in most of the content that I see in the course notes. With the number of Rails and Ruby books becoming available and the amount of blog activity its hard not to be informed these days. So for me, the value of the course was in the sharing and reinforcement that I know the latest practices and that I know any applicable heuristics.

Bottom line: highly recommended.

To the uninitiated, RIF means reduction in force.

On February 15th, Nokia announced that they would be reducing staff in their IT organization.  A total of 90 people globally were said to affected.  Finland was to be affected first, then the folks Stateside.  Apparently, there are complicated labor laws in Europe and so it took them a while to get to us in the States.

We had received little information until finally meeting invitations were received by all.  In those meetings you were to be told if you were staying or going.  I was told today that I was going.

I was prepared for this news, but still surprised.  In January, I received my best review yet, though all my reviews have always been better than average.  In addition, I’m on a team that already is short-handed and serves a business with aggressive goals.  I’m involved in two high-priority initiatives targeted for June 30th deployment.  The funny thing is, we just yesterday met to begin to explore who might back me up while I’m gone on my upcoming vacation.  In the end, no one really had the time, but we decided we’d explore it as the time grew closer.  So to me, this decision does not appear to be in harmony with business needs and competencies.  I am sure there will be some interesting fallout once our business partners learn that their goals may be affected by these cuts.

Quite frankly, this is a change for me that has been a long time coming, and though this is not necessarily on my terms, I am looking forward to what’s next.  I will make that the subject of some future blog entry as I figure it out.

Its fair to say that Nokia has some challenges ahead to right their ship.  Many of the points that I made in my Why IT Sucks post were inspired by some of my recent experiences there.  Based upon the feedback inspired by the Reddit readership who visited the entry, my experiences there are not unrepresentative of the industry as a whole.  But anyway, they really need to consider their management approach in both their business and technical areas.  We rarely saw our line or organizational management wandering the aisles or asking questions.  There are opportunities for them to get to know “the factory”, improve it, and be better equipped to manage and sell its services.  Without knowing its people or processes, its inevitable that each may go astray.

On the bright side, while at Nokia, I was able to supplement my Java skills and to be a part of bringing complex systems into being.  We introduced the Spring Framework to the company as well as other frameworks like the Acegi Framework for Security.  Not only did we introduce it, we built a federation of 20+ web apps that are happily deployed on a WebLogic Platform, but none of these apps use session beans or entity beans.  We introduced lightweight J2EE into the company successfully and we did so based upon our own initiative.  This is to say that we found the framework, we learned it without any formal training, and we deployed it successfully.  This is quite a feather in our caps.

I did introduce Ruby and Rails where I could, but quite honestly it just doesn’t appear to be taking hold.  Nokia is really a Java shop and they announced recently a desire to move to LAMP architectures.  I don’t disagree with LAMP architectures, but I think Ruby and Rails would enable cleaner application architectures to evolve.  I don’t think this was even considered because the idea of LAMP architectures came from Finland and there doesn’t appear to be too much awareness of Rails in Finland.  Apparently Jarkko isn’t spreading the word well enough. :)

To be fair to Nokia, they have at least been pretty fair with the termination process.  Some companies put you out on the street with little notice and with little regard to your financial situation.  Nokia has defined a transition period, where I will transition whatever I know and whatever I am involved in, followed by another period where I am not required to be onsite or carry any responsibilities.  The point of this period is to look for employment.  Thereafter, there is a lump sum severance which is reasonable given my 5-year tenure.  Suffice it to say, this is the best I’ve been treated and I am thankful.

So with that, its on to what’s next and I’m looking forward to the ride!

For those of you interested in UK Geocoding, I just saw this post come across the wire.  If you aren’t doing anything of high-volume or with high-availability needs, maybe this is a temporary answer for you.

I’ve received quite a few inquiries on this topic, so apparently there is quite a lot of interest in us doing some of this.  I’m happy to take a shot at this if I can solicit some help from my readership.  I basically need you folks to do some legwork for me.

It would be helpful if I could get the consensus view of the geocoding services that you folks are interested in.  It would also help to know if they have sandbox capabilities so that I don’t have to pay a tremendous amount to work through the development process.  And lastly, I might ask for some suggestions on the GeoLoc data elements front.  Obviously, its quite US-centric, at the moment.

I do reserve the right to use your suggestions selectively based upon time, expense, and convenience, but I think you already knew that.  So let me know your thoughts!

More and more work is being done by geographically disparate teams these days, so a continuous integration tool like CruiseControl.rb is quite useful. Andre and I could have used this when we were heads down with GeoKit. But better late than never, right?

I decided I would make an attempt to deploy CruiseControl.rb to one of the hosts that I have — and do so with Capistrano. For the most part, it was pretty painless, but I did run into a gotcha or two.

First, the host I deployed to uses the Apache / Lighttpd (fastcgi) style of deployment. Unfortunately, Lighttpd just would never start up for me! After way too long, I finally figured out that I had DOS line breaks in my file that I could not see. So I zapped them with dos2unix and all was well. Unfortunately, this ate up a lot of my time as I’m not very skilled at debugging fastcgi issues.

CruiseControl.rb is a Rails app, but not your typical Rails app. It uses no Rails app, but rather stores your project information in a projects directory underneath the app root. Further, its more than just a Rails app, it utilizes additional processes as project builders.

To deploy with Capistrano, you have to preserve the projects directory so that it will persist across your releases. That’s pretty easy to do with symlinks, so that’s a piece of cake. You can use the after_update_code callback to do this.

There are two other use cases that I could see that I would need. Adding a project and starting a builder for that project. To enable those, I added Capistrano tasks for each. Both tasks rely on environment variables and both tasks could probably benefit from a bit more error-checking, but they are good enough for me.

So to start a project, I use:

NAME=GeoKit URL=svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/geokit cap add_project

to start its builder, I use:

NAME=GeoKit cap start_builder

I added my custom tasks under config/recipes/cruisecontrol.rb and required this in deploy.rb. The custom tasks code is below:

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Capistrano.configuration(:must_exist).load do

  desc “Update symlink for projects directory.“
  task :after_update_code do
    run <<-CMD
      rm -rf #{release_path}/projects &&
      ln -nfs #{shared_path}/projects #{release_path}/projects
    CMD
  end

  desc “Add a project to cruise control.“
  task :add_project do
    unless ENV[‘NAME‘] && ENV[‘URL‘] 
      raise ArgumentError, “***** You must specify the NAME and URL parameters to add a project. *****“ 
    end   
    run “#{current_release}/cruise add #{ENV[‘NAME‘]} –url #{ENV[‘URL‘]}“
  end
  
  desc “Start a builder for a project.“
  task :start_builder do
    raise ArgumentError, “***** You must specify the NAME of the project to build. *****“ unless ENV[‘NAME‘] 
    run “#{current_release}/cruise build #{ENV[‘NAME‘]} &“   
  end
end

And with that, any of my projects can now be monitored with CruiseControl.rb.

A few caveats.

• I had to physically edit the cruise_config.rb file (on the server) for the project to include my email address and polling interval. No big deal, its a one-time thing.
• If your code is proprietary, you may want to protect the site with
  basic authentication to keep unwanted eyes from seeing your project assets.
• Since your project data is on your server’s file system, you may want to consider a backup strategy if you value your build history.

Suggestions for ThoughtWorks:

• Consider including Capistrano tasks to make it easier — mine are admittedly rough, I’m sure.
• Consider adding some element of authorization by project. For example, I have public plugins, but I also have proprietary code that I do not wish to share. Obviously, its easy enough to deploy a second site, but that’s mildly inconvenient.

I hope this is helpful to continuous integration fans out there trying to get set up!

Its been a while since I tinkered with GeoKit, but when I read this post, I thought I’d take a look at a couple of things that were mentioned.

James wrote that it would be nice to be able to reset the default_units value to enable localization.  Well, actually you can.  :default_units is modifiable through a class accessor.  Also, you can pass an optional parameter in your finders called :units which enables you to override whatever default value you’ve set.

While we’re talking about defaults, I applied a patch submitted by Hoan Ton-That which enables you to specify your preferences for units and for the formula from within the environment files.  So these preferences would appear right along side your API keys for GeoKit.  Its a small feature, but you may appreciate it.  Thanks Hoan!

Otherwise, James mentioned that :include support is lacking with GeoKit.  That’s not entirely true.  I added a passing test case which successfully pulls columns from a belongs_to relationship.  I suspect that the has_many relationships are the problem.  But if your case is covered by the belongs_to relationship, then you are covered.

There is a less-used method called distance_sql which enables you to just get the distance calculation in SQL form.  You would use this if you ever found that GeoKit could not support your exact query requirements.  Its less elegant for sure, but saves you the trouble of having to code the distance calculation.

UK geocoding is still in the roadmap, but both Andre and I have a few other projects and side endeavors going on.