It is important to not only listen to the client, but to engage with them, to challenge their ideas and conceptions, to offer your own technical advice and to utilise the report so fostered to deliver a solution that meets the customer’s needs.
http://frater.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/the-software-craftsmanship-furor/
If you are a ruby programmer/enthusiast living in New York City, I already know two things:
1) You *need* to attend the New York Ruby Meetup
2) I am *extremely* jealous that it does not take you 3 hours round trip and planning in advance
The second part is something that is only relevant to me so I won’t go into it but let’s focus on #1. The reason I say you need to go is because it’s a great group of people hanging out and talking about Ruby as well as other related technologies in the landscape. The organizers, Matthew Jording and Haris Amin, do an amazing job of choosing topics that vary in range from very beginner friendly to some advanced stuff.
What makes it even more fun for someone like me who has limited experience in Ruby, web development and open source tools is that it is an active discussion rather than someone giving a talk with others listening. If you have ever been to an unconference (if you have not, I highly recommend Ruby DCamp and I have heard a lot of good things about Bohconf), you will find that the meetup is inspired by the participant-driven nature of unconferences. If you are a code slinger, the group has a Github organization page and the group gets together now & then to work on some code together as well. Since it’s a social group, people usually hit a local bar in the area after the meetup to talk more over beers & snacks. It’s an all around fun crowd.
As a Red Sox fan, it is very hard for me to say nice things about New York City but the tech community in New York is definitely one of its strengths. Having a lot of smart people and a passionate organizers like Matt and Haris has made the New York Ruby Meetup very successful in building a community and making it worth the effort for me to make a 3 hour round trip just to hang out & geek out with these guys.
I am very thankful for this group to have started me down the path of learning Ruby by rubbing elbows with more experienced professionals and even though my technical expertise are still at the beginner level, the introduction to the community aspect of Ruby and the injection of passion that this meetup has given me is something I will forever be grateful for.
So if you are in the NYC area and are interested in Ruby, no matter your experience level, I highly recommend that you check this meetup out. If you are a beginner who is interested in learning more Ruby by doing, you should check out a sister meetup called Unearth Ruby. It’s a meetup for programmers that want to learn Ruby by working on problems found in the ruby quiz, project euler etc. We are trying to find venues for Unearth so if you are a company that can serve as a weekend venue for Unearth, please let me know in the comments section.
I recently an example of why I think my parents did a good job of raising me. However, their impact on my life goes well beyond that. What I am today & where I am today is because of the sacrifices that they have made and for that I am forever thankful.
I grew up like any normal kid with obsession with cartoons, action figures (He-Man was pretty big back then in Nepal) and playing with the neighborhood kids. Despite having a modest income, my parents always made sure that me & my brother got what we wanted as long as it was reasonable. We weren’t always reasonable so having that restriction taught us that when you can’t have everything you want, you learn to focus on what you need. Again, a very smart lesson that has helped me a lot, especially since I have some disposable income now :).
But you already knew they were smart so I will focus on the part about toughening it out. I was not necessarily a tough kid. A little scolding from my parents was enough to get me teary eyed. So when I came to the United States in 2002, I was clearly concerned how I will be able to handle the pressures of academics, making friends in a new environment, having to figure out how to manage finances & making enough money through on campus jobs to pay for my own education. For someone with a childhood shielded from most of the tougher realities of life, this was a pretty tall order.
When I look back though, there are two things that clearly have helped me in times when I most doubted my ability to make it through the immediate crisis I was faced with. The first thing that I remembered was what my dad had told me in the car about a week before I was scheduled to leave for the US. I still remember the moment clearly, his expression proud of what I had done up to that point but also aware of what challenges laid ahead me. “Son, the only kind of man worth being in this world in a self-made man.”
Boom! I still feel the power & wisdom in those words and they continue to fill in me a sense of determination to face any kind of challenge ahead of me & see it through. They weren’t empty words either because my dad was exactly that, a self-made man. Whatever we had growing up was a result of his hard work & my mom’s amazing ability to manage the resources to the fullest but I will talk about them more in detail in separate posts in the future.
The second thing that keeps me going is a picture that we have of my parents in our living room. In this picture, they have a huge smile, the kind of smile that reflects that they are truly happy and content in that moment with each other and with the life that they have. I remember the first moment too when I noticed the picture and vowed to do everything in my power to make sure that I bring them the same kind of joy over & over again. It’s like every son’s dream, to make their parents proud and I think so far I think I have been able to give them at least one of two moments.
So there you have it. Those are the two things that I always think of and they always manage to give me the energy, focus & determination to take on any kind of challenges. So even though I am far away physically from them, I can still feel their presence everyday around me, guiding me & encouraging me and that is what keeps me going.
Here is to you Mom & Dad!
Finding what’s absolutely important and what’s not is still an art, at first. Once you have users, you can figure out what they want by tracking what they do, or by asking for feedback directly.
When you’re giving up forty hours a week to a profession, the opportunity to develop passion around that profession is addictive, and rightly so.
http://lizkeogh.com/2011/01/13/agile-training-a-recipe-for-failure/
In the end, there’s no way to eliminate shoddy workmanship. But we can promote craftsmanship and the people who practice it. We can help those who are willing to learn and practice. It’s a messy world and we can’t fix that. But we must do what we can, or it only gets worse.
http://blog.gdinwiddie.com/2011/01/17/trades-crafts-and-certification/
One of the many things that I appreciate about my parents has been one of the most important lessons I have learnt in my twenty-eight years of existence. The lesson was that when you are given the freedom to make a choice, you need to understand that you are responsible for the consequences. With that little bit of wisdom, they let me make my choices (with certain restrictions).
I did not begin to understand how valuable this was until I was 19 and a few months from coming to the US for my undergraduate degree. It was then, at a party at a relative’s house, the moment arrived for me and my dad to have a father and son moment: my first drink with the old man. I was not naive and this was not my first drink and something tells me that my parents were well aware of it.
It was not so much the moment though but the realization afterwards that made me aware that now I have been given the freedom of making a choice to drink in front of my parents. With that choice, now it is my responsibility to make sure that I do not lose the trust that they had in me to give me that freedom. Granted I was not too crazy with booze, after being given that choice, I found that I was more responsible with alcohol.
Unfortunately, my college did not have the same faith in me and other 600 hundred or so students that were of age to drink. It was a dry campus and I am sure the people who made that decision thought that this would help students not be distracted and focus on their education but they were sadly mistaken. It clearly did not help me because since alcohol was prohibited, whenever there was any around, people would try and drink as fast as they can so they don’t get caught. Clearly not a responsible behavior.
I was not smart enough to understand it then but now I see that where my parents got it right and the school did not was in terms of ownership of the choice. In the case with my parents, they made me own my choice and made it very clear that I was responsible for the consequences of my actions. By making the choice for me and my friends, the school however took the ownership and indirectly (and most likely unintentionally) sent the message to everyone that we are no longer responsible for any consequences of that choice. If anything, it’s the school’s fault.
The message here is clear: Treat people like adults and they will behave as adults but if you treat them like children, they will behave like children. Unfortunately, a lot of people make this mistake. I know I have made similar mistakes myself and probably still am. You can see an example of this in cases of companies where face time is more valuable than your output at work. What companies fail to realize is that when they focus on whether the employee is there between certain hours, they are unintentionally sending the message that your job is to be here between certain hours and not so much as produce awesome work.
If you were mentoring a programmer with just a few years of experience wanting to learn ruby & good programming practices, what are the first three things you will have your mentee do? Why? Is Why relevant?
The only way I’ve found to learn to be an effective programmer is to write programs.
I had the opportunity to attend Ruby DCamp this past summer & I am not exaggerating when I say that the experience I had has made a huge impact on me & how I view myself as a programmer. I had just returned from my first Ruby conference when I found out about a 3 day camp in Virginia with Code Retreat on the first day followed by unconference the other two days. Prior to this, I had only heard about code retreats & I had no idea what an unconference was but since the event was free & driving from Connecticut to Virginia was not something that I considered as an inconvenience, I signed up. Little did I know that I was going to come back inspired (if you doubt this, you can talk to anyone from the New York Ruby Meetup group & they will tell you that Ruby DCamp inspired everyone)
The code retreat portion was super fun as we worked on Conway’s Game of Life multiple times, each time with a new partner. It was great to pair program with different people because everyone brought their unique style to the table. It was great to approach the same problem from different angles between focusing on the board once to focusing purely on the rule engine the next. It was so amazing that another member of New York Ruby Meetup & I decided to start a meetup dedicated to beginning rubyists to learn by pair programming & using TDD. While we have been struggling to get space for regular gathering, we’ve had one meetup & have a good level of interest.
Having never been to an unconference, I had no idea what to expect the coming days were going to bring. Summary was that I had my mind blown. I actually “led” a talk on code reading (knowing nothing about it myself but wanting to find more about techniques from other knowledgeable people in the crowd). It was great because the talk evolved to a higher level discussion about coding practices. My mind was blown & not just by what was discussed but by the power & flexibility that unconference gave to everyone to guide the discussion & organically turn into something more awesome.
There were so many great talks but Trevor is much better at taking notes than I am. *HI TREVOR!* He gave a talk on how to take awesome notes but sadly there was no one to take notes for him (at least no one that I know of). Huge kudos goes to Evan Light who organizes Ruby DCamp every year & inspires so many rubyists on a daily basis. I can also say that he has this amazing superpower of remembering people’s name very quickly. There were about 50-70 of us at the camp & he had no problem remembering people’s name. THAT IS IMPRESSIVE! He also is a go to guy for some good scotch recommendations!
Outside of code retreat & unconference, it was awesome to hang out with rubyists & learn from everyone. If you are a n00b, then you should DEFINITELY go if you can because the sheer amount of knowledge & ideas shared during those 3 days is unbelievable. Follow ruby_dcamp if you want to stay in the loop for when registrations open up next summer.
And there you have it, my post on Ruby DCamp three months after attending. At this rate, you can expect a post on my experience with Ruby Mendicant University (RMU) in early January :).
