Rocky Mountain Ruby Conf 2011

The Foraker Labs team had a great time at this year’s Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference (#rockymtnruby). It was fantastic to see a full house at the Boulder Theatre for the two days of the conference, and we enjoyed hanging out with old friends from within the Boulder Ruby community, as well as getting a chance to meet a whole host of visitors from near and far.

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

How to become a better programmer in 90 days

Foraker Labs just posted this (unofficial) YouTube video of the lightning talk I had a chance to give at the Mountain.rb Ruby conference last week in downtown Boulder, Colorado:

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!

Mountain.rb 2010 recap

I had a great time along with some of the rest of the Foraker crew at Mountain.rb, Boulder’s own Ruby conference.

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

Hiring 101

Foraker just posted my new blog article: “Hiring 101“. The key point:

At Foraker, we recognize that our best chance at success involves getting the right people on our bus. So we’re almost always looking for people who live and breathe the web, who are passionate about getting just a little bit better every single day, who enjoy the challenge of working closely with a team of like-minded individuals, and who are eager to produce exceptional websites and web applications for our clients.

What we look for: Passion + team fit + core skills + general intelligence. In that order.

Why Rails?

Foraker just posted my new blog article: “Why Rails?“. The key point:

Rails lets us focus on solving business problems. At the end of the day, our customers care more about results than about any particular technology. Using Rails as a common language for our team means we can spend more time wrestling with our customers’ business problems, and less time wrestling with the technology itself. Rails lets us get started quickly, work efficiently, and respond flexibly, helping us to focus on the real challenges of designing and implementing functional, usable, and reliable web applications for our customers.