Being a programmer, you have an invaluable skill that you need to learn to harness. Investors realize this already which is why they’ll spend stacks of cash to have you build them something that’ll someday be profitable. Large corporations realize the value in good developers and sometimes bend over backwards trying to retain their top talent. To be able to program well is a skill that people clearly value but why do programmers tend to place such little value on their own talents?

I know amazing developers who have spent the last decade building other people a fortune in IP while spending very little of their time building their own software. While its easy to look at the paychecks coming in and be content with your progress as an individual, when you put your progress into the context of intellectual property ownership most developers are left with empty pockets. Investors and businessmen use developers to build intellectual property for their businesses. They pay good money for a developer’s time along the way and usually the developer moves onto something else within a few years and the business finds someone new they can use to extend their growing IP treasure chests.

When I look back on my own past decade, I’ve seen plenty of cash come and go yet the only thing that remains is the software I’ve built for myself in my own time. I put my time and effort into the context of IP and suddenly the value I place on my own time and skill begins to rise. I recently read an article geared towards investors that was recommending keeping good developers on your side at all costs. It argued no matter what a developer was building it was better to keep them busy building you IP and on your team than to lose valuable talent. I read that and taking the context of IP and the value of my time into account I asked myself why I wasn’t spending more of my free time extending my own IP treasure chest? I listened to the advise of that article to investors and I’ve committed to investing more in myself.

I’ve recently tasked myself with performing a major upgrade for Webster’s Classroom. It includes both a complete site redesign and an upgrade to the latest version of Rails. We all know its a bit of a pain to upgrade from Rails 2 to Rails 3 but the longer you put off the upgrade the more painful it becomes. The app was written as a proof of concept many years ago and despite its growing user base it doesn’t have a strong enough foundation to allow it to continue expanding. We build it too quick and sloppy years ago and as a result we are testless and in need of major refactoring.

The lack of tests actually makes the upgrade easier in some respects because instead of having to hassle of fixing a bunch of sloppy tests I’m building everything from scratch both the app and the tests. The refactoring needed for this upgrade is like writing the application from scratch anyway. The existing code I’m using more or less as a rough sketch of feature requests and I have full intention of throwing all that code away if it makes sense to in this new context. Instead of trying to upgrade the inline Prototype Javascript to jQuery and UJS piece by piece, I’ve decided its best to just throw all the old Javascript out the window and start fresh. I’m committed to getting as close to 100% test coverage as possible these days so as I’m doing the upgrade and redesign I’m making damn sure there’s proper tests in place this time around.

I’ve upgraded a handful of apps to Rails 3 from Rails 2 already and in the past I’ve started off trying to upgrade within the current code base. I’ve had numerous problems with this approach and unless you’re really meticulous on every single file, you’re going to end up with a bunch of old junk files laying around and likely some missing new ones that you’ll want. This time I’ve taken a different approach and started off with a fresh default Rails 3.1 install and began moving over the legacy code file by file. I’m happy with taking this approach and instead of trying to take my Rails 2 code and upgrade it to Rails 3. Starting with a fresh Rails 3.1 code base and moving over code where it needs to be has given me the chance to move things into places they ought to be like moving code outside of the environment configs and into initializers. If I had just tried to upgrade the old code inline, I wouldn’t have spent the same amount of attention on cleaning up that mess. Once this upgrade it deployable, Webster’s Classroom is going to be in a position to really expand dramatically and rapidly.

Its been quite some time since I posted anything so I feel a necessity to publish something. I’ve started many posts since the last one but I never really liked how they turned out so I discarded them. I’ve learned plenty of new things which I tried to share but never had enough time to devote towards a solid post about any of it. Considering that time seems to be always something I’m lacking, I will just post a random rant about what I’ve been up to.

I’ve started working on a Facebook app for a client called Redflag. Its an app that lets parents monitor their child’s Facebook accounts for potential bad friends. Its a fairly complex app written in both node.js and Ruby on Rails. Node.js was something I hadn’t worked with before this project but I really like it. Its a little confusing thinking in terms of asynchronous execution of code in our app because there’s a ton going on behind the scenes and its a little difficult to visualize how thing all tie back together through callbacks. The complexity of our node.js backend makes it extremely difficult to test well but we do have a small but growing suite of jasmine tests for it.

I’ve been continuing to work with San Francisco Soup Company on their kitchen management application and have hired another developer, Jose, to help out. He’s an excellent developer and writes some really solid code. We’ve migrated the site to Rackspace’s cloud and I’m really liking Rackspace over Amazon’s EC2 these days. Their web interface is much more usable and I can actually get ahold of someone when there’s a support issue. The server seems to run much faster than similar EC2 instances and is cheaper so I’m pretty happy with Rackspace so far. We’ve been working on refactoring the code and building a more comprehensive test suite which is coming along extremely well.

More interestingly, I’ve started partnering with different businesses to expand my development and design resources. These additional resources will allow me to expand Onomojo in new directions and produce better results than I could just by myself. My focus is on partnering with companies that have solid development processes or are at least adaptable enough to conform to my own methodologies and best practices. By partnering primarily with businesses instead of individual talent, I will be able to provide more consistant results for my clients without the HR headache that comes with managing a team of remote developers. I have an agressive growth goal for 2012 and with the partnerships I’ve been building I believe Onomojo is in a good position to realize those goals.

I’ve also made great progress towards getting back into graduate school. I am working on a plan that will let me continue being CEO of Onomojo but allow me the flexibility to get my PhD. I’ve retaken the GRE and got a great score. I’m still working on narrowing down my school choices and drafting my applications. I don’t expect to apply anytime soon though. I need to have my ducks in a row before I jump back into academia. I won’t be applying until next year at the soonest with a starting date of 1.5 to 2 years from now.

This site has been a long time coming. I pretty much finished the prototype about 6 months ago and the CEO is working on funding to take it to the next level. Its a great way to easily contribute to charities around the world without costing you a single penny. It basically takes profits collected per transaction and donates them to your selected charities or causes. By integrating into your existing shopping cart, you can help save the world without costing you a single penny more than what you’d already be paying in processing fees. Take a look at the site and if you’d like more information please don’t hesitate to contact me or one of the other contacts on the site.

That response sounds familiar but really isn’t that comforting or
realistic. You’re suggesting its rare to have instances disappear yet
it happened twice in less than 6 months. You’re suggesting I upgrade
to a more expensive server which may or may not solve the problem. You
don’t know what causes the instances to disappear but for some reason
a more expensive instance solves the problem. I’m not sure how those
dots are connected but it certainly doesn’t add up to me. You want me
to spend more money per month without any real justification,
quantitative data, or explanations.

To summarize:

* You don’t know why instances disappear.
* Its rare for instances to disappear.
* The solution is to spend more money per month.

From my perspective, you still haven’t resolved the underlying
problem. You suggest maybe hardware but hardware crashes twice in 6
months? That doesn’t sound realistic. The issue that concerns me is
that you haven’t addressed the underlying problem of why the instances
disappeared. You’ve only offered a solution that has no connection to
the actual problem: Get a better server. Of course, I could just go
straight to Amazon and bypass EY altogether if I were to get another
server.

Without really understanding why the instances are disappearing it
points to a bigger problem at EY than just this issue. It points to a
lack of concern for your clients, a lack of understanding of your own
technology, and a fundamental problem in how you attempt to solve the
problems presented to you. Its a ‘shuffle it under the rug’ approach
to solving your problems which doesn’t bode well with me. Your
solution is, simply put, one without any technical merit. Anyone in
sales could have given me the same answer. If I were to refer clients
to EY and they had other problems that you couldn’t figure out would
your solution be that they need to upgrade their servers?

I appreciate your delayed investigation into the issue but I
definitely won’t be moving more of my clients to EY anytime soon. I’m
actually glad you reached out to me recently because its given me the
motivation to review what I still see as this outstanding issue. As
such, I’ve decided to cancel my EY account.

> From: EY
>
> X and Y asked me to follow up with you on this.
> First of all, if someone on my team dropped the ball on getting back to you,
> we apologize. I will follow up with the engineers on my end.
> Re. instances disappearing – I found and reviewed the ticket for when this
> happened. It appears that it was no longer possible to SSH into your
> instance and when our engineer tried to terminate it, it was stuck in a
> shutting down state. I can’t answer why this happened in this particular
> case, but out of the several thousand AWS instances we manage on the EY
> AppCloud, occasionally we have observed that an instance can disappear or
> become unresponsive. This can happen, for example, if the physical server
> it is mounted on fails. The few times we have seen it, it has been for
> Small instances, which is what you had. Our default AWS instance size for
> EY AppCloud is now Medium, which we to date have not observed issues with.
> Hope that answers your question – and feel free to contact me for any
> additional questions about this.

It was just brought to my attention that my company’s homepage was pointing to the wrong app. This has happened a few times since I’ve switched to EngineYard. They don’t include www aliases in the default nginx configuration so you have to add them with a keep.domain.conf file. I recently migrated my company site to a new instance and left the default configuration. When I checked to make sure the app was setup on the new instance properly, http://onomojo.com , it worked fine and I didn’t think anything of it. Of course, I didn’t test http://www.onomojo.com which ended up pointing to an app that is still in the early phases of development since I didn’t customize the nginx config. What a huge goof. No wonder I’m getting mixed responses from potential new work lately. If you’re reading this and you saw the awkward half broken site with the test video please revisit the site again.

I like to do my part to save the planet and this is just one way in which Onomojo is trying to help. We’ve just recently finished a non-profit site promoting No Plastic Day which is on June 8, 2010. So far we’ve got a decent amount of people joining the event and I’m asking for your help in promoting it further. We all need to do our part to save the planet. One day without disposable plastics isn’t much to ask. Join us and together we can create a better future.

Rojo is Onomojo’s Ruby on Rails Content Management System. You can find it here:

http://github.com/onomojo/rojo

Today we made some changes to make the initial setup of a Rojo instance easier. The steps to setup a new Rojo instance are clearly detailed in the README. This should help eliminate most of the problems new users were encountering when trying to setup Rojo from scratch. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions for improving the setup process.

In the next few weeks, we will be releasing the plugins that we’ve developed for Rojo including a blog, video gallery, photo gallery, and more so stay tuned.

I am experimenting with a new Engine Yard account today and their Setup basically requires you to have your projects in git. Since the site was from a private svn repos I decided I’d go ahead and signup for a paid Github account so I can host my projects there privately instead of having to setup my own git server. I should have trusted my gut because not more than a few hours later here I am trying to access my Github account and the site is broken again.

We’ve been working on this part time for a while now and I finally decided to just go ahead and release it. Its far from perfect and isn’t what I originally envisioned but it does work and we do use it on a number of sites. Its fairly stable and we have a handful of plugins that I’ll be releasing in the next week or two.

The 2 main motivations for Rojo came from the lacking diversity in Ruby on Rails content management systems. There are a few and some work well but I wasn’t happy with the learning curve with the ones I explored when we initially started this project. It seemed to me that every time I embraced a CMS the CMS ended up determining how I had to write my application. Its simply impossible to craft a CMS that enforces a strict data and programming interface that works for every situation. I didn’t want a content management system that forced me to write my tables one way or another or forced me to communicate with the CMS in certain ways. In short, I really just wanted a simple core that I could easily extend in any way I needed without having to conform to any standard imposed by the CMS.

You can check out the Rojo code here: http://github.com/onomojo/rojo