Here’s a brief overview of some of our favorite talks.

SELECT *
FROM posts
ORDER BY (SELECT last_name FROM comments WHERE post_id = posts.id) DESC;

The ORDER BY clause will use whatever’s returned from the subquery to order things.

class Array
  def random_pick
    self.sort_by { rand }.first
  end
end

So then you can do things like this:

def what_is_your_favorite_color?
  colors = [ 'red', 'blue', 'green', 'yellow', 'purple', 'pink', 'black' ]
  colors.random_pick
end

Please don’t ask my why I’m doing this. The answer has something to do with test data.

1. Stop complaining about the client.

2. Stop complaining about the project.

3. Stop complaining about the team.

4. Stop complaining about the technology.

5. Start solving problems.

desc "The answer to life, the universe, and everything"
task :answer do |t|
  puts "42"
  if Rake.application.options.trace
    puts "Task '#{t.name}' is in --trace mode"
  end
end

Note that you can also set Rake.application.options.trace = true in your Rake task if you always want to see the stack trace information.

How to Become a Better Programmer in 90 Days

In this brief talk I present highlights from three books on my required reading list that (I believe) will help make you a better programmer:

• The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Thanks to Derek Olson for taping and editing, and thanks again to Marty Haught for organizing the conference!

Check out my recap of Mountain.rb, posted in two parts on the Foraker blog.

Why? The topic of “clean code” is a tough one to teach. Ask a random sampling of programmers and you’ll probably get a wide variety of opinions about what constitutes “clean” or readable code. Everybody has their likes, dislikes, and preferred idioms. And when we start with code that seems “bad” and try to talk about what “cleaner” code would look like we often end up talking in circles, debating what “good” code really means.

So in effort to avoid letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, I’m thinking it might make sense to try to play around a bit with de-factoring as a tool. Let’s see how it works if we start with something we might call clean, and then work to make it much worse, talking about what it is that makes it worse along the way.

Stay tuned. There’s hopefully more to follow on this topic!

gem environment gemdir

Hope it’s useful!

The third installment in this series is about something I learned well before I got into management. In fact, it’s probably the reason why I got into management at all:

Get up out of your chair.

As geeks we’d rather just sit there. Sit in our chairs and send yet another email and hope enough folks read it. We spend a whole hour crafting a brilliant treatise on an Important Topic and assume that our written words alone are motivating enough to get people to do what we need them to do. And we hope (in vain) that people will read our words carefully, reflect deeply, and return the favor by drafting a well-written response of their own.

But when it comes to managing people email simply doesn’t work as well as we wish it did. It’s often the wrong tool entirely. You know this as well as I do. People simply don’t read your emails carefully. Or they miss it entirely. Or the message gets to them too late. Or too soon. And even when they do read your email, people can almost always manage to misinterpret the tone of your message and you end up spending even more time clarifying and apologizing and re-iterating. Et cetera.

In my experience, the only thing that does work is to do something that is entirely unnatural for most in the world of high tech: Get up out of your chair and practice some “MBWA“. MBWA stands for “management by walking around“. It means you go and walk over to somebody and actually engage in conversation. Talk to them. Talk first about the weather or their kids or whatever they’re working on at the moment. Then transition the conversation to what you need to talk about, or just drop in your request casually at the end. And sometimes, just like magic, you learn things without even having to prod. It goes like this:

Tammy sitting reading email. Manager enters, stage right.

Manager: “Hey, Tammy. What’s new?”
Tammy: “Just reading the latest missive from the client. They’re being a little less insane than usual today.”
Manager: “Nice! Always good when sanity prevails, eh?”
Tammy: “Yeah, absolutely. We can use a little bit of a break after yesterday’s server issues.”
Manager: “Wow, really? I must have missed that somehow. We had server issues yesterday?”
Tammy: “Yeah. It turns out the new audit trail feature caused our logs to fill up and we ran out of disk space.”
Manager: “Ouch! But yeah, that makes sense. You’ve got it fixed now though, right?”
Tammy: “Yep. We’re purging logs every 30 days now.”
Manager: “Good deal. Client seems happy?”
Tammy: “Sure. They seemed to like that we responded so quickly.”
Manager: “Excellent. Thanks for jumping in there!”

Manager exits, stage left. Elapsed time: 45 seconds.

3 reasons why MBWA can make you more effective

• It’s faster. Yes, it is. You might think you don’t have time to get up from your desk and actually go through the hassle of walking over, interrupting the person in the middle of their Facebooking, and actually talking about what needs to get done. But in the same 5 minutes it would have taken you to write an email you’re able to not only make the request but respond to questions immediately.
• It builds relationships. Being face-to-face with someone puts you in a position to tailor your message to the individual and respond immediately to questions in a way that is most effective for that person. Moreover, engaging people one-on-one helps build the relationship — you learn more about each other. This learning is the foundation of trust, and having trust means your conversations will end up getting faster and more effective over time, especially during a crisis or when speed is of the essence. And having more face-to-face conversations also ends up making it easier for the other person to interpret your “tone” when you only send email or IMs.
• It helps you learn and know more. As a manager you deal in information, and you’re missing out on at least 50% of the data feed if you’re not there in person. As I’ve already said, actually getting up and talking to other human beings seems counter-intuitive and at least somewhat stressful to most of us in technology. And here’s the thing: Most of our team naturally tends to avoid the face-to-face conversation as well. Yet the example above shows that it’s through the quick face-to-face interactions that we’re able to learn much, much more about what’s actually going on in our organization. Your team member may be too busy fighting a fire to send a detailed email, and maybe he’s not the type to swing by and chat either. But being there allows you to sense and prod and follow hunches, all of which end up providing you with more information, making you more effective.

So don’t just sit there in your corner office typing on the computer. As a manager your job is all about making everybody more effective by getting the right information to and from the right people at the right time. You just can’t do that with email alone. As my good friend and colleague Derek Olson likes to say: “The weeds are waist high. Sometimes you just need to stand up to see over them.”