I don’t know what I’m doing.

And why the future of business is to be where others fear to tread

As soon as you think you’ve got it sussed, it changes. This happens every week, no, make that every day, hour, minute and second. The old certainties are gone and in their place we have rolling never-ending disruption. Oh, what’s that you say? There’s a new format for this ad or that ad? Surprise me. Nothing stays the same. We live and work in a super fast, super fluid environment where there are no rules, really.

Now, depending on your bent, this is either a pain in the arse and an obstacle, or the best full throttle, jump out of bed, greet the day with a shout opportunity that you ever got. It’s like Christmas every day. We don’t create, we invent. And what’s better than that? Inventing doesn’t require rules – they’re for people who want to know what they’re doing, who like order and the fact that everything has its place.

Creative? That’s sooo, 20th Century. Where I spend my time we make stuff, we imagine, wonder, copy, borrow, steal and cobble together. We invent. ‘How do you do that?’ ‘I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out.’ Look at that, if you mix it with this and take some of that, it makes this! If where you work isn’t like this and you’ve got a bunch of people called creatives having ‘ideas’ then you work at an ad agency, a place with rules and people know what they’re doing because they’ve done it before.

As was, creativity is the preserve of the few, its top down and hierarchical, structured and rules based. Traditional. Its old and it doesn’t work anymore. Constant disruption requires people who embrace it and feel comfortable with it. Where we work, we don’t know what we’re doing because its never been done before and in order to remain fresh, smart and ahead of the pack, you have to be inventive. It’s the ability to invent that’s at a premium. Inventors have no fear of the unknown. They like change and a lack of boundaries, Its where they thrive.

And this is where we are; we’re all inventors, media planner, art director, Flash programmer, strategist, every last one. At the edge of knowledge, technology, understanding. Here I am. I don’t know what I’m doing, because if I did I would be yesterday.

© 2007 Rob Lawrence @ Avenue A | Razorfish UK

This place, the people that fill it, they “get it”.

Do i need much more reason to like coming to work on a monday morning?

New York

In the spring me and my partner went off to New York, this was the first time I had ever to the states, and I loved it. New York is an amazing place, and I really hope we get to go again soon. Whilst we were there we enjoyed lots of touristy sight-seeing trips and ate at lots of gorgeous eateries such as Gobo and Candle 79.

Whilst in NY we also took an internal flight up to the Niagara Falls (canadian side), which was amazing, the immediate difference between the USA + Canada was astonishing, and I really hope we get to explore Canada in a bit more depth in 2008.

RailsConf 2007

After New York I attended RailsConf in Portland OR, this was on the best experiences of my life. I was my first major conference and I met some brilliant people, it was really good to meet up with lots of like minded people, and a trip the I’ve not forgot throughout the year.

I’m hoping to go again in 2008 and have yet to speak to my work about it, I just hope they will see the value in sending me there, as I have given up a lot of Rails development since working at Avenue A | Razorfish to focus more on Flex / Actionscript development, which I’ve loved, but my heart is with Ruby / Rails.

Turning 21

The summer saw me turn 21, and my gorgeous boyfriend planned the most amazing surprise fancy dress birthday party for me. It was an amazingly good laugh and really fun to see my family and friends dress up in silly costumes for my benefit.

Quitting Impact

Probably the biggest thing to change in my life this year was finally leaving the shit-hole I used to work at, Impact IM Ltd. It was the best decision I made and am glad to finally be out of there, and I wasn’t the only one to think so, nearly everyone I worked with at that hell-hole have now left also.

Impact did nothing but set me back in 2007 and made my working life incredibly unfulfilling, hollow and ultimately depressing. Just read back though some of my posts.

Starting at Avenue A | Razorfish

One of the best things to happen this year was starting at Avenue A | Razorfish, I’ve already written about how amazing they are to work for so I’m not going to reiterate that here, but I have now finished my 3 month probation and am there for the long haul.

That’s all for now, I’m off to Dubai for Xmas in less than 24 hours, so i’ll leave you with our work’s christmas card to keep you entertained. Enjoy!

the past few weeks have bee a bit insane, work has become progressively more crap than even i thought impact could possibly become. it seems as though the people who ‘get it’ and are trying to make things go as smoothly as possible are shat on, and it’s just not fair.

i had my annual (not that i’ve even had one yet… in 2 years) review not to long ago, and it was… well it was confrontational, absurd and ultimately made me realize that impact isn’t somewhere i want to be spending my time and effort anymore.

you see the problem is i was promised a review of my contract and salary upon return from railsconf, it was the only reason i was going to railsconf. for me it was recognition from my employer that the immense amount of effort and dedication i have put into impact over the past 2 years was going to be fairly rewarded (at this point i am still not earning what my original position was advertised at!). in my two years at impact i have helped change the way the new media department works completely. when i started sites were built using font tags and tables! all software was stolen, illegal. designers were developers, developers were shit at their jobs. it was a mess.

two years later and we have a clear separation of design and development, all of our software is legit, our hosting solutions are top notch (and saving us thousands) we have a brilliant project manager (love you babes) and things are really starting to work properly. and of course all of our work is clean and lean semantic XHTML and CSS, everything is usability and accessibility tested and the maintainability is greatly improved.

back to the railsconf promise, a few weeks before going i was made to sign to contracts, one stating that if i leave the company within 18 months of the conference i am to pay-back the full cost of sending me there. and another to increase my notification period to 3 months.

i signed them hesitantly because there was no mention of my pay-rise in either, and i definitely felt there should have been. i raised the issue with my immediate boss and was promised that it’s nothing to worry about and upon my return my contract and pay packet would be reviewed as previously discussed. i decided to trust this as i had pretty good relationship with my my boss and didn’t think he would be able to lie to me about something like that.

biggest. fucking. mistake. of. my. life.

turns out he has no problem lying directly to my face. a week before leaving for portland i’m told that i won’t be getting a pay-rise. now i’m pissed. really fucking pissed.

so back to my review (are you still following?)

i raised all of these points and more in my review, and was basically told (paraphrased):

the past is in the past, deal with it. if you want more money you have to prove yourself.

oh and not forgetting:

if we lose job X and job X i blame you entirely.

half way through the review i checked-out, mentally gave up. fine, i thought, fuck it. i don’t care anymore.

i obviously hadn’t proved myself enough in two years of dedicated work, and was clearly the sole reason for a jobs partially flawed execution (couldn’t have possibly been that the head of client services was less than cooperative in briefing the job in correctly and maintaining a level of communication on the job)

in fact the only thing that has been proved (to me) in two years is that i should have left a long time ago. impact doesn’t ‘get it’ the thinking is all wrong. they’ve come from a print and design background and are trying to make noise in the new media world with the wrong attitude and the wrong management. the best thing they could do would be to remove the input of a certain md from far away (i’ll let you work that one out) and replace the so called department manager (haha) with someone who has actually even done the job and isn’t just a salesman with a scary delusion that a team of 3 people in the nowhere of marden can actually take on a job from playstation.

so back to my news (we’re nearly there i promise)

i’ve been job hunting (obviously) and have some great feedback. i’ve decided to accept a job at Avenue A | Razorfish, the largest interactive agency in the world. i had one interview in the pub which went amazingly well, then another a couple of days later and was offered the job on the spot.

the thing is aa|rf ‘get it’, the management have all been there and done it before, the process is streamlined, the client services team understand how to brief a job in (because they only do digital) and more importantly the culture is amazing, people are given time to develop their skills.

when i told my new employer about the way impact nm runs, they laughed, then were really shocked. they could see i would go nowhere at impact and have decided to let me grow at their place.

i’m gonna miss the people at impact, but not the management.

better things await me. and i hope the remaining nm staff realize that impact will probably never ‘get it’.

Community

RailsConf rocked, so much more than I could have hoped for an so many levels, the content was brilliant the people were amazing, organizationally the thing was a stunning success and what was achieved by the community and what was achieved by many people on an individual basis was amazing.

The feeling was very community focused, the Rails community has grown exponentially over the past year, and this was definitely reflected in the mix of and volume of people. I spoke to at least hundred Java developers, as well as some .NET folk and a whole mix of people from other languages. All here to have a little look at this web app frame work written in this crazy Ruby language.

The numbers as well, this year there were over 1600 people in attendance, last year 500, the year before there was no conference. In one year Rails as a community has grown so quickly, many many people are getting wealthy off the back of it, and I think this was Chad’s point on the first day, if we were all to use that for good, we can show the rest of the IT tech, hell the world, we can show them that we can make a difference. Well I think we were all listening, last time I checked we had raised over $33,000 in donations.

The community, as well as the framework have grown and matured, and it’s good to see companies like Adobe, Sun, O’rielly and Amazon making their presence at this conference for a framework only 2 years old.

Enterprise

As larger companies start to pay more attention to us it’s important to make sure we are ready to deal with what the enterprise world wants, through projects like JRuby and others.

Although this is good, in a way, I hope Rails will maintain it’s Opinion as it is spun off in all sorts of directions. It’s a little bit over my head if truth be known. But interest from larger companies can only mean good right? Probably wrong? I don’t know.

Enterprise anxiety was definitely a strong theme running the conference.

REST

REST was covered heavily at RailsConf also, there were over 4 separate talks on the subject. This is important I guess, as we hurtle towards Rails 2, REST is going to become more and more central to what it is the core team are thinking.

Plugin’s like Hamilton’s make_resourceful have already started popping up all over the place and getting knowledge on it all know while it’s still all EDGE-centric, is going to prove really useful down the line. DHH’s keynote actually helped to clarify one of my biggest concerns, nested resources, or something. Either way I have a better understanding of it all now.

RailsConf was an amazing experience, something I wouldn’t have changed. The best thing to come out of the whole thing was meeting 3 wonderful human beings, Anthony Ramm, Dan Tripp and Jeremy Sydik. You three are amazing, Thank You for making the experience so welcoming and warm.

To summarize, I’ve met some amazingly talented, clever and inspirational people over the past 4 days. I’ve felt the power of the community to truly do something amazing and make a real difference, and above everything I’ve left with 3 brilliant friends.

Roll on RailsConf 2008.

Bring Ruby to the Enterprise. Not the Other Way ‘Round

Cyndi Mitchell’s opening keynote was very good, although the community may not like It (in certain circles) there Is a need to educate and support enterprising companies about the virtues of rails/ruby.

Cyndi’s talk was very well paced and touched on some humorous comparisons between pop culture and tech-industry, some of her slides were awesome too. A good start to the day.

Tim Bray

Tim bray’s keynote was again on rails / enterprise, sun’s position on It, his passion for It. To be honest a lot of went over my head, I was really tired. That guy seems awesome though.

Custom Rails Helpers: Keeping Your Views DRY

The first session of the day focused on DRYing up your views with custom helpers, this was cool, not from a “i’m learning something new” perspective, more from a “I do this already, I’m so glad I’m doing right”

Although the session taught me nothing new, It did validate a lot of the work of been doing on helpers, so It felt kinda cool. was very busy.

Memcaching Rails

Chris Wanstrath, of err the blog fame (that’s where I heard of him anyway) presented this talk.

It focused on the probleming of caching, and his solution cache_fu. It was a really Insightful session with some wicked slides, and chris himself Is super animated, which Is always good.

It left me with enough knowledge to know where to start with caching, that Is when I need It.

The Dark Art of Developing Plugins

This session was really cool, It walked through making a simple plugin and was themed like a horror flick. wicked.

The really Insightful stuff was about ruby, extending and overwriting and all that jazz, was way cool. that class_eval method Is some crazy ass ninja kung fu.

Makes me wanna wrap up some common stuff Into plugins now.

Data Warehouses with ActiveWarehouse

This was way more high brow than I was expecting, and although I was following along alright top begin with, as soon as the concept of cubes and dimensional data aggregation started I had to walk.

But If the need every came along to churn through piles of data and make It relevant, this would be my starting post.

The day ended In a chinese restaurant, with my sipping beer from a tea cup.

Chad Fowler’s Intro

The day kicked off with chad fowler opening the keynote with an important message: “Everyone thinks we are a bunch of arrogant bastards.” People laughed at this at first, but as he kept talking what he was saying become apparent, as our community grows more and more of us are becoming wealthy off the back of rails it becomes important to prove to the rest of the world that we can make a difference.

It was an important message, there are nearly 2000 people at RailsConf and if we each donated $100 to the Pragmatic Studio’s Charity of Choice we can prove to people that we can change the world.

Or something.

DHH’s Keynote

David’s keynote was good, the focus was on Rails 2, recapping the features introducing some minor new features, and indicating which features are going to be removed.

One of the things he highlighted which definitely got me excited was some further clarification on and enhancements to the way that RESTful routing works, my biggest gripe with that was admin/backend routing and implementing REST in all situation.

This has been cleaned up a lot and you can now namespace your RESTful routes / resources.

Another neat thing was the respond_to stuff, it now seems (i might be wrong) that this has become transparent in detecting and routing mime types. which is nice.

ActiveResource looks sweet. It’s going to be replacing ActiveWebService and is completely focused on consuming REST interfaces. REST is one of the main focuses of Rails 2, it’s the new opinion, if you’re going to be devleoping an app, it should be REST routed, APIs should be based on REST. Good opinions.

respond_to :voice

This was the first session of the day, at it fucking rocked.

It was an introduction to using the Asterisk PBX with rails, using a new plugin called Telegraph.

I looked into Asterisk a while ago, and the AGI config files are just horrible, hundreds of lines of extraneous repetitive code. nasty.

Telegraph takes these AGI/AMI config files and wraps them in clean MVC ruby code. The thing that really got me going was the possibilities, the guy gave some demo’s and it’s really exciting. The general idea is that you can take your rails app and another interface for your users to interact with it in. Voice, using Asterisk and Telegraph will allow you to have your app call out to people, have people call in, consume data over the phone, maintain session data between the web and the phone network (super sweet).

I really cant wait to get going with it.

Doing Rest Right

I really really wanted this to be good. It wasn’t. Although it was insightful, and gave some brain food to chew over, it was a bit high-level and philosophical. I left early.

Apollo

This talk was kinda good, although not really Rails-centric, it was a nice introduction to the new Adobe cross-platform runtime for Flash/Flex/HTML/JS/PDF apps.

The really interesting thing is that all of the separate technologies supported inside of the runtime are treated as first class citizens with a common cross technology DOM to use.

You could basically have an Apollo app with an HTML viewer, and Flex/Flash component side by side, and cross-script between the two of them with a common DOM. Very neat.

Flex in general is something that I really need to get into (again)

Avi Bryant’s Keynote

Avi Bryant has been in and out of the Ruby community for a while, he’s a smalltalk advocate that works on the seaside project.

His talk was focused on the future of ruby, performance etc.

It was kinda good, a prompt to think of the future of our language. meh.

Ze Frank’s Keynote

Ze Frank, simply put is the fucking funniest thing ever. His keynote was more of a stand up comedy routine, with slides. The topic was accelerating anxiety.

I really can’t explain how good it was, you just have to google some of the stuff this guy has done. It was the perfect end to the day.

Intro to Test Driven Development with Rails

This tutorial was awesome, presented by David Chelimsky this really helped to solidify my understanding of TDD, as well as touching on and clarifying some aspects of Rspec.

The pace was good and the tutorial didn’t seem long enough, there was lots of good discussion and the code examples were great.

Part of the tutorial featured us “Pair Programming” (a practice from eXtreme Programming (XP)) The basic concept is one person writes a failing test, then the next writes just enough code to pass that test, then writes a another failing test for the previous person to fix, gradually the code is written and tested and passing mechanisms are refactored into useful clean code.

It was a really great exercise and provided a lot of value.

Harnessing Capistrano

The second tutorial of the day was presented by Jamis Buck, the creator of Capistrano and core member that works at 37 Signals.

I was really looking forward to this tutorial and although offered a lot of insight into the new feature of Capistrano 2.0, it was a little slow and dry.

I guess it’s kind of difficult to get excited about something without having a hands on experiance (there was no code writing in this tutorial) but it definitely left me with some ideas.

The day ended with Dan Tripp, Ant (another brit from Birmingham) and myself having dinner, drinking beer and talking g33k in a mexican joint downtown.

Getting here was easy, Portland has a tram system called the Max Light Rail, it’s free for most of the city, and only took like 20mins.

There are a lot of people here already and I expect there will be even more tomorrow.

Portland is a beautiful city, I could honestly see living here, image paris without the dirt and smog, make the roads and paths wider, take away the awkward angles and turn them into blocks and you have portland. Why paris? The trees, image the Champs-Élysées only every block is like that. It’s really beautiful, I had a good wonder around yesterday, the sine was shining, the trees were green, it was lovely. A woman at the airport told me that portland has the feel of a big-town rather than a city. She was right.

My hotel (the hotel lucia) is stunning. drop-dead-gorgeous. I also found a fabulous all-male designer underwear shop called Under U 4 Men, I dropped like $200 dollars in the already and I know I will go back.

All in all I’m having a great time so far.

It really struck are chord with me, I recommend anyone who writes code to read it then have a think about where you work, could you do better? I think I probably could.

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money

I’m sure there’s some valid business reason or some sort of financial excuse for this way of working (it does after all make sense, why spend 2 peoples time on 1 job when you can spend 2 peoples time on 2 jobs ) but even so, it just doesn’t feel right. A lot of the time it feels like we’re working in a factory. It’s boring and repetitive, like so:

• Job comes in
• Someone gets briefed
• That person works on that job, alone until it’s finished.
• Rinse
• Repeat

Working in this way generally means that on a job per job basis people’s time is split between 2 or 3 different disciplines, take for example my recent rails project; I have a certain amount of time in which to do it, but that time is taken up (so far) with design work in photoshop. It’s not that I’m useless in photoshop or anything, it’s just not where my focus needs to be on this project. Ideally I would have got my rough ideas down in photoshop and then given those to Ian to do his magic with, freeing me up to work on more important things such as coding.

Another huge problem is lack of man power, we have 2 people full time in our little internet team. 2 people, thats less than piss poor, it’s fucking shit. We easily have enough work to keep 3 or 4 people going, at the very least another person would help take away all the amend based jobs from myself and Ian, oh yeah where I work we have to deal with various amends and updates to existing sites, as well as tackle our own huge projects (which we’re working on solo remember) we don’t have a junior that can just deal with these little annoyances.

It’s all basically very demotivating to me and I just can’t help but wonder what shade of green the grass is on the other side. Maybe I should find out?

“From a personal perspective I feel a little disappointed in the decision as not only is it a bad idea for the job, it basically mean that my hard work in planning this project is going to be handed over to a team which I know from first hand experience isn’t capable of delivering 100%

I have made my feelings towards my role in the company very clear, I would like to take some of the programming work away from [other company] to help impact produce better solutions for our clients. I feel that this was an ideal opportunity to prove this, prove my work and install confidence in the technology with my bosses.”

That’s me with my big-boy hat on, no swearing, no rudeness. I take on another persona…

This must have paid off because on the friday my boss takes me to one of the meeting rooms to talk through the project, he opens with “I’ve made an executive decision, we’re doing it in house…”

I was so relieved, I think I must have been really into the job to care that much about it, I was really upset over it, it sounds silly but I take a great amount of pride in planning a job from start to finish, especially if at the end of it I know i’ve done my very best, and the job has been a success. If these other guys had done it, well lets not go there.

So there it is, I get to do it in rails after all, I’m really happy, i’ll be sure to post my progress as I go.

Their decision was that the site needs to stand the test of time, and in theory could still need to be updated / worked on 5 years from now, meaning that if I wasn’t working for them in 5 years they wouldn’t have any in house ruby people to work on it, or they would find it difficult to find an external company capable of picking up the work.

So instead our external programming people are going to be picking up the job, they program in asp.net, and unfortunately working with them often presents numerous problems. It’s a real shame because from them we only ever get the same ‘base code’ with chunks added on, all of the sites I have done with them have been frustrating and demoralizing.

I’m upset because my version of the site was to be a bespoke CMS based around the needs of the client, nothing more, nothing less, it’s been planned so that the CMS is 100% tailored to their exact needs. With these other guys doing it, well I’m sure it’ll be far from my vision, and very far from the clients expectations.

I guess I’m annoyed because i’ve made my feelings towards my position in the company crystal clear, I want to migrate more into programming (so we can program in-house) and away from design. This seemed like an ideal opportunity for us to launch our first rails site, and I’m positive it would’ve been far better for the client than anything the other guys can come up with.

At least in a few weeks time when it’s all done, full of bugs, off spec, design all over the place and the clients can’t understand / don’t want to learn how to use it, at least then i’ll be able to turn around and say “i told you so”

It could also be down to the fact that a lot of the older sites here, the ones which were designed / developed before the arrival of myself and Ian Weir (awesome designer guy) are pretty horrible, like really really bad. more on that another day.

I guess just having to actually spend time looking at these sites, and having to go in there and edit the god awful code is really really depressing. another factor has got to be that nearly all of our clients seem to be really boring, like gardening things and other such inspiring subjects.

what I’m really looking forward to however is a great project i’ve got coming up which involves melting about 5 sites which are all a mix of flash, html into one big Rails powered mega site.

I’ve been itching to get my hands really dirty at work with something like this and I can’t wait. My only concern is that I’ll end up being distracted every couple of minutes to answer stupid questions, and to make more of the above mentioned mind numbing amends to sites I hate. I guess I can live in hope that the powers that be realise that I am but one person with one attention span, and when I’m programming it’s the code which need’s my full attention, not anything else.