This last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the Advance2030 Web Development Weekend held on the LeanDog boat and spend some time with a great bunch of web folk from the area. This included sitting next to Joe Fiorini and Nate Klaiber and getting schooled in Rails on a nonstop basis. While the weekend was a great experience, I wanted to get some thoughts up about it while they’re still fresh.
Friday night was a great start. After a group gathering to go over the site, we split up into pairs to get a set of story cards created. This was a relatively new experience for me in terms of planning a development cycle. After tinkering with Cucumber over the last month, it seems to fit right into the Agile/BDD way and it’s something that certainly helps me focus on knowing what I plan on doing before I start coding.
Saturday was a different story. I literally spent the first 5 hours or so struggling with the Rails environment chosen for the weekend. I’m no Rails expert and I understand why some gems were chosen, like Bundler in a forward looking approach to the impending Rails3 release. But it seems a few of us had issues with it in combination with Authlogic because of which gems loaded first and if we had previously installed any gems using sudo instead of installing them into local gems. When it’s all said and done, I could run rake spec but Command-R in Textmate never worked right. Even after moving on I spent a lot of time dealing with schema.rb merge conflicts when pulling from upstream. This isn’t a terribly surprise given that file is a bottleneck of sorts when you have a lot of people adding migrations in rapid fire.
All in all, I got nothing done Saturday and I’m not proud of it. I lost my will to live at around 3PM. If I were to start an event like this, I would give serious thought to removing some of these pain points for the developers, esp for people who aren’t Rails experts. Stick to the stock Rails gem management setup. The less gems you load, the less shenanigans you have to fight, esp ones that try and manage gems/paths. At list for the first iteration. Also, I would either get the migrations/schema done before the event, or at least funnel migration creation through 1-2 people. Let everyone else mock their way down from the outside in.
Sunday was awesome. I did what I should’ve done Saturday. Grab a card and get something out the door and stop worrying if I’m doing it “right” the first time. It’s easier to re-factor than it is to create. Move forward. By the end of the night I managed to get a calendar page up, styled with the help of Parag including next/previous and month dropdown selection support.
I’m definitely looking forward to the next event like this. Hopefully by then I can get my current Rails project done so I won’t suck so much at the next event. 
Yeah, Saturday was a wash for me too. I felt bad bugging Joe and Nate so much since they were clearly the Rails superstars.
First off, I had a great time working next to you. I know much of my time may have seemed somewhat frantic, but I really enjoyed it. Honestly, I wish we could have paired more on a few things – but alas, hindsight is 20/20.
I completely agree that it would have been nice to have some of these issues solved beforehand. The issue there is 1) We didn’t know who all was truly committed, and 2) We don’t know everyone’s environment. Maybe we could have had a quick meeting sometime before the weekend, but that’s tough to do when you are competing with busy schedules.
I think we had a handful of people new to Ruby/Rails, and that’s why I wish there could have been more pairing involved. With that being said, I couldn’t have been happier with the results of the weekend. The dev issues aside, I think it was great to meet and learn more about local developers. We knew going into this that we couldn’t complete this 100% – which is why we wanted to have more fun with it.
Your insight, and your ability to execute the calendar page was awesome. I think it is definitely the hardest page of the site to get right, and was very pleased that you hit the ground running with it. You know, because I love calendar views on the web and all
ha.
Anyway – some very good points here – but I just wanted to say a great big thanks. It was a privilege getting to work next to you the entire weekend. Hope we can do that more often.
There’s one skill you had Nate that I wish to learn and I envy: Patience with context switching.
It doesn’t matter how busy, how far behind and how many people kept asking you questions and getting you off task, you kept plugging way, helped everyone and didn’t get cranky.
I have a weakness with that. When I get pulled away from writing code a lot, I tend to get cranky about it, which helps no one.
Chris,
Thanks for your glowing comments. I definitely take responsibility for your frustrations Saturday. There was a lot more work that could have been done up front had I had a little more foresight Friday night. I also should have had someone else test the environment Friday night to help me make sure everything was working. As Nate said, hindsight is 20/20 (or is that 20/30?)
I understand your frustrations with Bundler, but let me assure you, I’ve tried using the built-in config.gem command and it’s been nothing but trouble for me. It doesn’t resolve dependencies correctly, which ends up with some gems you have to install manually. Bundler is obviously a new tool and we’re all still learning it, but the advantages it provides outweigh the trouble it gave us getting started. And it will keep getting better no doubt!
Anyway, thanks so much for your dedication this past weekend. I certainly did not expect you to stick with us all weekend, especially after the issues you had Saturday, but you were there the whole time. The work you did was great and I really enjoyed working with you; I hope we get the opportunity to work together again on a project that is a little more organized with more pairing.
I can think of one way you, Nate and I can work together more frequently.
Chris — Found your blog through John Miller. Thanks for pointing me to the 20/30 Club, had no idea that existed.
John