:Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

After three weeks of development from scratch and four weeks of tuning and debugging, the team of Rubyists I have been working with for the last two months finally launched our last project. At 8:30 a.m. EST on Thursday, April 11, 2007, the Williams UK Formula 1 team’s new website went live!

Full credit where credit is due:

Endemol UK was contracted by Williams F1 to develop the site. After some months of dicking around, Endemol subcontracted Futurecorp to finish the job. Futurecorp is the UK virtual IT shop that hired me and other developers on an hourly basis for this project. We rewrote the full app in seven weeks and went live with it.

Not to be picky, but I wanted to make sure that the above was not left unsaid.

During the last seven weeks, we developed a complete content management system for Williams F1 news reports, event calendar, podcast and video content delivery, and Flash content management. The news, audio, video and event calendar is displayed in a user-friendly manner in a xhtml-strict compliant web front end for sports journalist access. The CMS also produces and manages content for a Flash front end for use by us common folk.

It has been a crazy time, especially the first three 65-plus-hour weeks of horror. I am particularly proud of those three weeks, because we had a fully functional application finished by that time. Rails really is that productive, folks. This was not a small application by any means.

The last four weeks have been more tame, with interminable boring hours of online chit chat BS sessions in Campfire, as developers waited and waited for QA to finish testing and maybe find a few lowly bugs for us developers to squash. The bug count was really low and we developers went home hungry some days.

Congratulations to all of the people below. I will miss working with all of you, it’s been a great time.

Ruby on Rails Team

Team Lead: Nick Wright, Colorado, USA

Kyle Drake, Minnesota, USA
Mark Selby, UK
Dougal Shearer, Scotland
Steven Holloway, Australia
Yury Kotlyarov, Russia
Brad Bollenbach, Montreal, Canada
and myself, Puerto Rico, USA territory

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HTML Team

Team Lead: Dan Whitmarsh, Sweden

Gary Robinson, UK & Ben Miller, UK

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Flash Team

Team Lead: Matt Folkard, UK

Tim Cooper, UK & Julian Wilson, L.A., California, USA

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Support & Infrastructure Team

Team Lead: Jason Griffiths, UK

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Project Leads:

Michael Christenson, Ohio, USA
Williams Project Lead, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Shaun Laughey, UK
Director of Operations, Futurecorp UK Ltd

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Management:

Max Haggenmiller, UK
General Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Radha Stirling, UK
Head of Development, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Justin Fanning, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Eddie Bosticco, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

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rails, ruby, software.development

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I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.3. It was another flawless upgrade.

Akismet tells me that it has blocked over 1900 comment spam since March 22, and 3,130 since I installed it. I have only had three or four false negatives. That is, spam that wasn’t caught and ended up in my moderation queue. I made an effort to go through all my caught spam looking for false positives, and found none.

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So when they flew me to NYC for lunch, I was very sure this company was interested in hiring me (duh!) I had a great time talking with the company CEO and the president, enjoying their wit and seeing their lifelong friendship at work during our discussions. That was quite interesting. I also had a good conversation with a fellow grunt, Sonny, with whom I will probably be working. I start at the new job on April 16.

They paid for my flight, overnight stay, and lunch. The lunch was really enjoyable, both conversation-wise and food-wise. I don’t remember the name of the family-oriented seafood restaurant where we went. It was within two or three blocks of Broadway and 19th Street. I want to go there again and try more items from their menu.

At the end of the day, I received a job offer, which I accepted. I’ll still be working from home as a Ruby on Rails developer, but I will be a salaried full-timer with benefits, instead of an hourly gun-for-hire. I have had enough of the gun-for-hire lifestyle for now, and this opportunity with this company was too good to pass up.

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NYC was a hoot. I saw this guy with a giant inflatable cockroach in front of a building. Turns out he was a paid protester! When some group wants to protest something, they hire this guy, and he prints out some flyers, drives to wherever they ask him to go, gets out the giant inflatable rat and/or the giant inflatable cockroach, gets out his bullhorn, and he has a protest! He is also available for political campaigns, but he prefers hanging out with the cockroach and the rat. I thought that was pretty funny.

Another funny aspect of NYC, is that every block has at least one guy in a small plexiglass shop on wheels hitched to a truck, selling a bagel or donut with coffee for about $3. Each of these vendors has enough coffee, bagels and donuts for a few hours of sales. When they run out, they drive to the bakery where they get their goods, stock up, and drive back to the area they were last at, to continue selling their wares.

I really had a good time in Manhattan, and would like to visit again and do more touristy things.

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After my interview in NYC last March, I took a train to Lancaster County, PA, and stayed with my friend the sci-fi writer, her husband and twin 3 year old girls. I rented a car to visit my other college friends and an aunt and her husband in Southeastern PA over the weekend. It was great to see everybody and to see them well. I’m glad they all live within one and a half hours of each other.

I am going to be planning a move to the Philadelphia suburbs over the next six months. I don’t own any furniture, don’t have a wife and kids, so it’s just me, my computers, and game consoles. I’ll probably disassemble the two PC clone towers and ship the parts separately, then reassemble them back in PA.

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Wednesday is my last day at the hourly Rails gig. It has been a crazy seven weeks. We’ve been ready to go live for the last two weeks or so, but the client wanted some changes to how a few things worked. And of course that meant new bugs to stomp.

I’ve thrown in a few hints as to what the site is about, specifically mentioning yesterday’s Malaysian Gran Prix in a previous post. I can’t wait to show off what we’ve worked on. It really is a cool site. Latest news is that we go live Wednesday, but I’m taking that with a grain of salt. So don’t hold me to it.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development, upgrades, wordpress

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