Steve Spalding of Crossing Gaps interviewed me a short time ago for his Really Great Stories podcast. We had a great conversation that revolved around transparency and social media. Listen to the podcast and let me know your take on the subjects we covered.

In episode 4 of Rock the Job, Nick and I show you how to get off the Internet and out into the real world.

We had planned to move scrum’d last night to a new host, however, during the move something happened with the database server and we had to perform a restore of the last backup. Everything should be in place as the backup that was restored was from 15 minutes before we began the server move.

We are planning to move scrum’d on Wednesday night around 11 PM EST. This should take only an hour or so and scrum’d should be down for a few hours tops as the main factor is the DNS update.

Thank you for your patience while we get scrum’d onto the new server.

Most readers can probably skip this, but I’ve recently been asked about setting up a rails development environment and figured it would be nice if I had somewhere to point them with an up-to-date, concise list of steps to get up and running. I believe the following is the easiest, most straightforward way to start with rails on OS X:

Make sure you have XCode installed. This is so you have the necessary compilers and libraries. You can find it on your OS X install DVD, or download it here.

Install macports. This gives you a FreeBSD-like “port” command for installing open-source software that has been ported to OS X.

Time to install ruby! You can do this via macports in the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal):

sudo port install ruby

You should go ahead and install wget too. It’s handy. Plus you’ll need it for the next step:

sudo port install wget

The package manager for ruby libraries is rubygems. The macports version is usually outdated, you can install it from source by going to: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems/, clicking “download” for the “rubygems” package, then finding the most recent “.tgz” release, and copying the url. Now, in terminal, run these commands to unpack and install (the rubyforge url I’m using is the most recent at the time I wrote this):

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/56227/rubygems-1.3.3.tgz
tar -xzvf rubygems-1.3.3.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.3
sudo ruby setup.rb

Now this should show you the version number you just installed:

gem -v

Before we start installing gems, go ahead and install mysql:

sudo port install mysql5 +server

It will end by giving you some commands to run to initialize the database and set it up to auto-run on boot. Go ahead and run those commands.

Then install the mysql bindings for ruby:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

Lets install rails!

sudo gem install rails

This will install rails and all dependencies. When it’s done you should have a “rails” command in your path. You can use that to initialize your first app:

rails myapp

That will create a shell application with all the necessary files and directories. Hop in there and fire up a development server:

cd myapp
ruby script/server

This will leave the server running in the terminal. To stop the server, type ^c (Ctrl-C).

Now fire up a web browser and visit: http://localhost:3000/ You should see a rails welcome page with some instructions for getting started. Have fun!

In order to use Cucumber to test a site that uses subdomains to scope things like user accounts, add something like this to your relevant step:

Given /^An account$/ do
  account = Factory(:account)
  host! "#{account.subdomain}.example.com"
end

and if you’re using SubdomainFu, make sure the tld_size for your test environment is set to 1 (or whatever is appropriate). By default it is set to 0. You can do this in features/support/env.rb:

SubdomainFu.tld_size = 1

Now any path built after that Given will use the account’s subdomdain in the request.host.

In this video I lay out the ideals that Atlantic Dominion Solutions was founded on, and what you can and should expect when you work with us.

Parents being involved in the lives of their children is an absolute necessity, however some parents take it way to far, to the detriment of their kids.

I first heard the term “helicopter parents” a number of months ago in my MBA class. The same day, I learned about “blackhawk parents.” This past Tuesday, I learned yet a third term: “lawnmower parents.” Here’s the definitions of each, straight from the all-knowing Wikipedia:

Helicopter parents

A colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child’s or children’s experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. These parents rush to prevent any harm or failure from befalling them and will not let them learn from their own mistakes, sometimes even contrary to the children’s wishes. They are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach, whether their children need them or not.

Blackhawk parents

…those who cross the line from a mere excess of zeal to unethical behavior, such as writing their children’s college admission essays.

And you thought that was bad? Oh noes, it gets worse.

Lawnmower parents

…[used] to describe mothers and fathers who attempt to smooth out and mow down all obstacles, to the extent that they may even attempt to interfere at their children’s workplaces, regarding salaries and promotions, after they have graduated from college and are supposedly living on their own.

What!?

Are you freaking kidding me? At first I couldn’t believe that these types of parents existed. I sure wasn’t raised to have mommy and daddy come swooping in when my grades started slipping or I needed to negotiate salary for a job.

It’s called responsibility people. Have some, and take it for yourself.

I heard yet another sad story Tuesday night of a young guy, around 22 or 23-years-old, that had a solid job offer on the table that he had accepted. When he was on a conference call with a company to finalize the details, his father got on the phone. When asked why, the father responded that he was on to help negotiate the salary and benefits for his son. What was the result of that? The father was told that he had successfully negotiated his son’s salary down to zero and that his services would no longer be needed. The father, incredulous, stammered for a response and had only a dial tone for consolation.

What’s Happened Here?

That’s what I want to know. When did parents start being involved directly in job negotiations for their kids? When did employers start letting this happened? What has happened to personal responsibility? Sure, go ahead and ask your parents for advice, but don’t put them on the phone.

Do you have experience with these kids or their parents? I’d love to hear about them below.

On behalf of the team here at Atlantic Dominion Solutions, I thank all of our courageous men and women who have died in the service of our great country. You kept our country safe and fought to help those who could not help themselves. Your courage and fortitude is an example to us all.

I also thank all of the men and women currently serving in the military. You too fight and sacrifice to keep our country safe and help those in need. We appreciate all that you do, and hope that you all come home soon.

I had the opportunity last week to take an Agile estimating and planning class from the man who wrote the book on it – Mike Cohn. Mike was gracious enough to take a few minutes and answer a few questions I had about Agile, Scrum, and the bumps in the road to adoption that teams encounter.

Learn more about Agile development with Scrum.

We currently have all of our apps hosted on Morph, which is typically rock solid. This morning though they had a bit of a hiccup though. I got texted by Pingdom this morning at 7:21 AM EST alerting me that all of our apps were down. I contacted Morph who let me know they knew of the issue and were working to resolve it. After about 30 minutes or so they gave me the all clear. All of our apps are now back up, and we’ll be crediting everyone for a full day of service.

Here’s the official word from Morph:

“At approximately 5:00 a.m. PST one of our shared storage servers stopped responding. Once we determined the issue we issued a restart to that server and at 5:35 PST all effected sites came back online.”