Rabid Brains

Christchurch Rails Girls

Rose and I coached at Rails Girls Christchurch in May. Given Rabid’s commitment to diversity, it was great for Rabid to sponsor the event by sending us down to Christchurch. The awesome weekend was superbly organised by Hayley van Waas, Elora Walmisley and Daniel Fone. The event was held at Canterbury University and as a result, most participants were students already studying Computer Science or Software Engineering.

Why is 20% time good for us all?

In my old life in the film industry, we all worked for free; on short films, music videos or low-budget features. It’s how we gained experience and credits on our CV, as well as supported our fellow filmmakers on projects we cared about. I’ve done my fair share of free stuff over the years, but there comes a point when you just have to say “No” - my time and contribution has value, no more freebies!

So I was pleasantly surprised when I joined Rabid and found out they had a policy of 20% time projects as part of the working week. At Rabid, this generally happens on a Friday. It’s when we can choose what we’d like to work on; perhaps some training or professional development, our own project, a startup or that really good idea we’ve had for a while and we want to see if it flies, or not. It creates a bit of space where clients know we are not available to give us time free of other commitments to control our own priorities.

Rapid Growth at Rabid

Marian here from Rabidtech to talk about our recent company growth and how we dealt with almost doubling our size in three months. I was part of the group that looked at how we were onboarding our staff and worked to make it better. I’m a developer, but I like having processes so this was something I wanted to help with.

I start working for Rabid in February, and since then we have hired five developers, a designer and an office administrator. All this growth has happened to support our growing business opportunities. The challenge that comes with such rapid growth is inevitable growing pains. We found that our existing buddy system and face to face explanations were no longer sufficient to get new employees onboard and integrated into our company and culture.

Codemania 2016

When my awesome and generous employers at Rabid Technologies approved my request to go to Codemania and Codemania Conversations, I had no idea what to expect. I mean, I’ve been to tech conferences before, so I had a pretty clear idea of what the formal conference part of Codemania might be like, but the unconference Conversations was a new and mysterious unknown. And now that I’m sitting down a week later to write a post about my experience, I’m at a loss for how to break it all down and share it in a coherent fashion!

About to start! #codemania pic.twitter.com/uODkEwmxP8

— Cara Hill (@ilikeprettycode) March 31, 2016

Object-free DCI

Some of you may already know me, as I've been around the Rails community for some time, including being on the RubyNZ Committee for two terms and having organised the 2015 RailsCamp NZ. You might say that I know a few things about Ruby, and maybe even about object oriented design.

Over the last couple of years the Ruby community has been learning from its Smalltalk roots about DCI with the help of great books like Clean Ruby by Jim Gay. Whether you buy into all the principles of DCI or prefer "DCI lite" (or Use Cases as Shevaun Coker calls them) there's been plenty of effort put into trying to teach Rails developers how to avoid "fat models".