giant robots smashing into other giant robots
Written by thoughtbot
Podcast Episode 16: Make it fast
In this episode of the Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podcast, Ben Orenstein is joined by William Josephson and Jay Moorthi from Solano Labs, the makers of tddium, the hosted, scalable continuous integration service. They discuss the architecture of the service, including how they’re using Go to speed up parts of it, the surprises they’ve had in getting started, how they’ve gotten involved in the Ruby community, and how they validated their idea and get feedback from customers. Also, they’re experience working with thoughtbot, what has worked and not worked for driving public customers to the site and converting them, dealing with privacy, customer support, their goals and their growth plans, and much more.
Episode #14: Say goodbye to that big guy
Ben Orenstein is joined by Prem Sichanugrist, a developer at thoughtbot and the #31 top Rails contributor. Ben and Prem walk through the major changes that will be introduced in Rails 4, including strong parameters, the new built in queue, cache_digest, changes in ActiveRecord::Relation, and ActiveResource. The also discuss what people can do to ease contribution and issue submission to Rails, how can people get their first commit into Rails, and much more.
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Episode #13 of the Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podcast: I’ll disagree in just a little bit
Ben Orenstein is joined by Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot, and Josh Clayton, developer at thoughtbot and the lead maintainer of FactoryGirl. In this Rails focused episode, Ben, Joe, and Josh dish on ActiveRecord callbacks, observers, state machines, and before_filters vs. middleware. They discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of each, and how to keep your app clean while doing the right thing. Then they touch on what’s new in FactoryGirl, how using build_stubbed can speed up your test suite, and much more.
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Ben Orenstein is joined by Matt Jankowski, COO of thoughtbot. Ben and Matt start off by talking about how Matt came to join thoughtbot and his role at the company. They then discuss the typical thoughtbot sales process. How all problems are communication problems. How the way thoughtbot works is appealing to startups and how they hear about thoughtbot. How thoughtbot handles its 20% investment time in open source and our own products, how we preserve that despite trying to grow the business, and how that has evolved over time. The reasons why it’s not always possible to work faster by increasing the team size. Goals, metrics, and things thoughtbot can do better. Plus, how project management techniques translate to child-rearing, his standing desk, and much more.
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You want your system to bend, not to break
In episode #11 of the Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots podcast, Ben Orenstein is joined by Sean Cribbs, Software Engineer at Basho, the makers of Riak.
Ben and Sean start off discussing the interesting overlap of programmers and musicians and why it seems to happen so much. They then discuss Sean’s role at Basho, what Riak is, how it works, and how it differs from other NoSQL databases. Sean works remotely for Basho, which has several offices, so Ben and Sean discuss remote workers and remote offices, and the ins and outs of navigating that set up, and how he got paid to work on open source. Finally, they discuss Erlang, which most of Riak is written in. These topics, plus much more.
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To have us answer your questions on the air
Email your questions to info@thoughtbot.com or tweet to us @thoughtbot.
Notes & Links
- Corpus callosum
- Riak Overview
- Basho
- Ruby client for Riak
- Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store - PDF
- Eventual consistency
- Riak: Read Repair
- BitTorrent Swarms
- Distributed hash table
- Riak: Ring
- Riak: Gossiping
- Cassandra
- Project Voldemort
- Strangeloop, Sept 23-25, 2012
- RICON, Oct 10-11, 2012
- Why Riak
- Erlang Programming Language
- Pragmatic Programmers: Erlang in Practice screencast
- Erlang: dialyzer
- Ruby laser
- Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
Upcoming Events
- Rocky Mountain Ruby, September 19-22, “Refactoring from Good to Great”
- Frozen Rails in Helsinki Finland, September 20-21, “When Not to Use Object-Oriented Techniques”
- View all events we’ll be at…
Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @seancribbs on twitter.
The Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots podcast is sponsored by thoughtbot, hosted by Ben Orenstein, recorded by Seana Quental, edited by Edward Loveall, and produced by Chad Pytel.
