Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

In this special episode from RubyConf 2012 we pulled aside some of the attendees and found out what they're working on. We also include a selection of the great lightning talks at the conference. Enjoy! Rob Mack from Spiceworks Dr. Nic Williams from Engine Yard talks about BOSH Ray Hightower from WisdomGroup, WindyCityRails, and ChicagoRuby Noel Rapin from Groupon John Foley and Nick Howard talk about Project Grok, an Open Source Code Reader Club (like a book club, but for code) Brian Ford from Engine Yard talks about Rubinious 2.0-rc1. Jeff Casimir from JumpstartLab talks about gSchool Daniel Huckstep from Yardstick Software talks about rc files and sub. Joshua Szmajda talks about the Ruby Hangout, an online Ruby meetup. Ron Evans from The Hybrid Group talks about gitnesse and wields a mean ukulele. Christian Trosclair from The Hybrid Group talks about Kids Code Camp and FeatureCreep Richard Schneeman from Heroku talks about Issue Triage. Chris Maddox from LivingSocial talks about happiness. Follow @thoughtbot and @rubyconf on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Aaron Patterson, Ruby Core team member, Rails Core team member, and a Señior Software Engineer at AT&T Interactive. Aaron and Ben discuss the upcoming features and excitement for Ruby 2.0 and some things Aaron would like to see in Ruby in the future that didn't quite make it into Ruby 2.0. They also discuss how the Rails Core team differs from the Ruby Core team, how much effort it takes to write a detailed blog post and how many mistakes are involved, how he likes being a ruby celebrity, his involvement in Seattle.rb and what it teaches him. Finally, how awesome his job is and how he could do it forever, how he worries about Ruby or Rails becoming irrelevant and wants to stop that from happening, how he is happy all the time, and if he could wave a magic wand and change one thing about Rails, what it would be. This and so much more in this entertaining episode recorded at RubyConf 2012. Tender Lovemaking Seattle.rb Follow @thoughtbot, @tenderlove, and @r00k on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Brennan Dunn, author of double your freelancing rate and planscope.io. Ben and Brennan discuss transitioning from a freelancer to a consulting company, the issues he faced doing it, and how he overcame them. How he promoted someone to replace him in his consulting company and is focused exclusively on products now, where Planscope came from, how it works, and how he more than doubled the conversion rate. How content marketing was slow to work for him, and how he fixed it. How to effectively pitch and sell products, what victory looks like for him and what he's working for, and so much more. Double Your Freelancing Rate in 14 Days Planscope, Project Management for Independents Kalzumeus Podcast 3: Growing Consulting Practices, with Brennan Dunn Workshop: Start Your Own Multi-Million Dollar Consultancy Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You To Be Rich The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't) Bidsketch Freckle MicroConf Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @brennandunn on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Kyle Fiedler, a designer at thoughtbot, and one of the creators of Bourbon Neat. Ben and Kyle discuss responsive design, what it is, and how to implement it. They also discuss Bourbon (a library of Sass mixins) and Neat (a fluid grid framework based on Bourbon), what's wrong with Twitter Bootstrap and why Bourbon Neat is better, and the other reasons why Bourbon Neat was created despite all the other grid frameworks that are available. Kyle shares the most common design mistakes he sees developers make in projects, whether or not design is subjective or whether it can be more objective, his design process and how it has changed, what the Golden Ratio is, and how it's used in Neat. Finally, they also discuss the Design for Developers workshop offered by thoughtbot, which teaches the fundamental design principles and tools to developers, and much, much more. Bourbon Bourbon Neat Sass Design for Developers Golden ratio Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @kylefiedler on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by William Josephson and Jay Moorthi from Solano Labs, the makers of tddium, the hosted, scalable continuous integration service. They discuss the architecture of the service, including how they're using Go to speed up parts of it, the surprises they've had in getting started, how they've gotten involved in the Ruby community, and how they validated their idea and get feedback from customers. Also, their experience working with thoughtbot, what has worked and not worked for driving public customers to the site and converting them, dealing with privacy, customer support, their goals and their growth plans, and much more. tddium (Solano Labs) Go eventmachine Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @tddium on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Seth Priebatsch, creator of SCVNGR and LevelUp. Ben and Seth talk about LevelUp, how it got started, how they make money, and what the future holds. They also discuss his daily schedule, maintaining focus, what he worries about, how your motives can limit your success, how to change the world by choosing the right thing to change, why he stopped hiding doubt and started being more transparent, and much, much more, including the most interesting question he's never been asked. SCVNGR LevelUp TEDX Talks, "Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world" TED Talks, "Iain Hutchison: Saving faces" Isis mobile wallet Reach the Beach Relay Killington Spartan Race Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @sethpriebatsch on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Prem Sichanugrist, a developer at thoughtbot and the #31 top Rails contributor. Ben and Prem walk through the major changes that will be introduced in Rails 4, including strong parameters, the new built in queue, cache_digest, changes in ActiveRecord::Relation, and ActiveResource. The also discuss what people can do to ease contribution and issue submission to Rails, how can people get their first commit into Rails, and much more. Prems Boston.rb talk and video: What to Expect in Rails 4.0 strong_parameters Queue cache_digests Russian (Matryoshka) doll Basecamp next Basecamp next RAM and caching hardware ActiveRecord::Relation Null Object pattern Tell Don't Ask ActiveResource Prem's first commit to Rails docrails Ruby on Rails Guides Follow @thoughtbot, @sikachu on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot, and Josh Clayton, developer at thoughtbot and the lead maintainer of FactoryGirl. In this Rails focused episode, Ben, Joe, and Josh dish on ActiveRecord callbacks, observers, state machines, and before_filters vs. middleware. They discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of each, and how to keep your app clean while doing the right thing. Then they touch on what's new in FactoryGirl, how using build_stubbed can speed up your test suite, and much more. Rails Guide: Active Record Validations and Callbacks Rails Guide: Action Controller, Filters Blog post: Ruby and KISS, Sitting in a Tree Method Object Feature Envy Rack: a Ruby Webserver Interface Rails Guide: Rails on Rack Rack::Cache Blog post: Use Factory Girl’s build_stubbed for a Faster Test Suite Blog post: Mind-Bending Factories Metaprogramming in the Wild: Source-Diving FactoryGirl Follow @thoughtbot, @joeferris, and @joshuaclayton on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Matt Jankowski, COO of thoughtbot. Ben and Matt start off by talking about how Matt came to join thoughtbot and his role at the company. They then discuss the typical thoughtbot sales process. How all problems are communication problems. How the way thoughtbot works is appealing to startups and how they hear about thoughtbot. How thoughtbot handles its 20% investment time in open source and our own products, how we preserve that despite trying to grow the business, and how that has evolved over time. The reasons why it's not always possible to work faster by increasing the team size. Goals, metrics, and things thoughtbot can do better. Plus, how project management techniques translate to child-rearing, his standing desk, and much more. Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @jankowski on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Ben Orenstein is joined by Sean Cribbs, Software Engineer at Basho, the makers of Riak. Ben and Sean start off discussing the interesting overlap of programmers and musicians and why it seems to happen so much. They then discuss Sean's role at Basho, what Riak is, how it works, and how it differs from other NoSQL databases. Sean works remotely for Basho, which has several offices, so Ben and Sean discuss remote workers and remote offices, and the ins and outs of navigating that set up, and how he got paid to work on open source. Finally, they discuss Erlang, which most of Riak is written in. These topics, plus much more. Corpus callosum Riak Overview Basho Ruby client for Riak Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store - PDF Eventual consistency Riak: Read Repair BitTorrent Swarms Distributed hash table Riak: Ring Riak: Gossiping Cassandra Project Voldemort Strangeloop, Sept 23-25, 2012 RICON, Oct 10-11, 2012 Why Riak Erlang Programming Language Pragmatic Programmers: Erlang in Practice screencast Erlang: dialyzer Ruby laser Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @seancribbs on twitter.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots