How We Hire Our Ruby on Rails Developers

Though the number of Ruby on Rails developers is rising, many may lack the level of experience that we require. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a strong hiring practice to identify the best candidate for a role, and ensure that new recruits are not simply apprentices but experienced developers who can contribute significantly from day one.

We have always taken inspiration from 37signal's working practices and recently came across Google's hiring strategy that seems to advocate what we happen to be practicing already. So in this blog I would like to give a bit of background information on hiring methods established by Google and 37signals, and then show how our recruitment process and strategies compare.

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Rails 3 default cookie domain for subdomains

In Rails 3 the way you set your default cookie domain to allow your session to be shared across subdomains has changed. In Rails 2.3.5 you would add the following to your application.rb :

config.action_dispatch.session = {:domain =>".mydomain.com"}

In Rails 3 there is now a session_store.rb initialiser, in there you can configure your default domain like so:

Rails.application.config.session_store :cookie_store,
                                  :key => '_app_session',
                                  :domain => '.mydomain.com'

 

Likebees Presentation at MiniBar

I gave a short talk at the MiniBar Finance Innovation conference last week.

MiniBar is a monthly tech and business conference which invites innovators and entrepreneurs to get together and share their ideas. This month, the event was sponsored by PayPal X and the six guest speakers each gave a 5-minute talk about innovation in payment systems. I used my slot to explain how we utilized the PayPal Adaptive Payments API when developing a group-buying application for our client, Likebees.

Likebees operates by offering users the chance to buy vouchers for substantial discounts for local services, such as restaurants or hairdressers. The catch is that the discount only becomes activated if enough people buy it, and this is where the pre-approval API becomes necessary. Instead of allowing each transaction go through so that they then have to be cancelled manually if the target number of buyers is not met, the API ensures that buyers are only charged when the deal reaches its 'tipping point'.

Anthony Hicks from PayPal cornered me for a quick interview afterwards:

Yannick, our client and Likebees co-founder also got caught on camera and explained the business side of Likebees in more detail:

Different Applications of Crowdsourcing

XML to JSON API Proxy for Quick Mash-ups

While building our company dashboard, which was mentioned in our previous blog post on SVG with Raphael, I came across a problem with the project management tool we use, Pivotal Tracker. 

The Pivotal Tracker API is only in XML, which means you can't do cross-domain requests and access the API via javascript. This meant that, if I wanted to extract data about the status of our user stories, I would have to do it on the server side. As everything so far had been done with javascript on the client side, I was reluctant to start making things more complicated.

I contacted Pivotal, who said they might think about adding JSON at some point, but I didn't want to wait for them to sort it out. Instead, I built a quick API proxy that allows you to make a request to a XML API and get back JSON. So, now, I can do this in my javascript:

It will proxy the GET request to the API and convert the XML response into JSON, via http://xml2json.heroku.com (supports JSONP). I've put the code on GitHub http://github.com/bitzesty/xml2jsonp in case anyone else needs to do the same thing.

SaaS: Opening up New Opportunities for Businesses

We have developed several SaaS (Software as a Service) applications for clients in the past and are currently working on our own SaaS project, so it feels like a good time to go into more detail about this burgeoning area of web development.

What is SaaS?
SaaS is where a service provider gives users access to software - such as Google Docs or Basecamp - through their browser. The user does not need to worry about the process of installing software and  the provider supplies an easy-to-use interface as well as hosting.

The service can be as simple as file storage, such as is provided by Flickr or Dropbox, or providers can offer software for entire e-commerce sites (e.g. Shopify) and CRMs (e.g. Highrise). These SaaS applications tend to be made available for a monthly fee, so that the provider generates income through subscriptions. Alternately, some SaaS providers take a mark-up from the sales.

Pros and Cons of SaaS
As an SaaS end user, the advantages are obvious: you gain access to a high level of functionality; you enjoy the support services of the provider; you can access it from any operating system, as it can be reached by any browser; and you don't have to deal with upgrading the software, as this will happen automatically.

You are also spared the up-front expense of buying software. This is particularly appealing for small businesses, where the monthly fee may be preferable to a large up-front payment.

SaaS in general is a good bet for start-ups and SMEs, as it offers them the chance to use software more advanced than they would usually be able to afford, without it taking up a lot of expensive server space. Indeed, with the global recession fresh in everyone's minds and IT capital budgets still very tight, large organizations are also beginning to use SaaS and to take advantage of the subscription based model.

However, using SaaS does mean that you are dependent on the provider, which in turn means that you are vulnerable if your provider suffers from a system failure or a security breach, or even physical damage.

This comes down to the trust which has to exist between the user and provider, but you can reduce the risk of losing all your data by taking basic precautions against unauthorised access and making regular back-ups.

Is SaaS for you?
The internet service provider Easynet Connect claims that more than half of small and medium enterprises will start to use The Cloud in their businesses in 2010. This shows that businesses are becoming more trusting and open to the opportunities that the internet has to offer. This in return is translating into an increasing uptake of SaaS by UK businesses, as reported by Information Age.

Whether you will be one of early adopters of SaaS depends on the size and nature of your business: if it is new and small, you will probably appreciate the monthly fee as opposed to a large up-front payment, while if you need to access your work from many different places the flexibility of using SaaS will suit you very well.

On the other hand, if your company is large and has a substantial IT budget and in-house resources, you may prefer the autonomy of actually owning everything.

If you feel that using SaaS could benefit your business, there is no reason why you shouldn't try it out. The risks can be kept to a minimum with the right precautions and you don't even have to run your entire business with SaaS. SaaS can be adopted to great effect just in a few areas of your business, so you should definitely investigate all the possibilities before committing to buying expensive enterprise software, especially for the non-critical areas of your business.

 

Bit Zesty - SaaS software development with Ruby on Rails

Talk at NoSQL EU on Different NoSQL Tools we Have Used

I gave a talk at NoSQL EU on a few of the different types of NoSQL solutions we've used in the past, explaining why we'd chosen each one and how they had worked for us. It was a bit tough to do whilst with a cold, so apologies if I sounded nasally/tired.

I've uploaded the slides to SlideShare for those who couldn't make it to the talk. At the moment, it is limited to the NoSQL solutions we have used on our projects, with case studies and a comparison of the benefits and drawbacks, but hopefully I'll be able to work on it more so that it incorporates some of the other 'bigger' NoSQL players, such as Riak and Cassandra.

Notes from the field: Different NoSQL tools in Production