Rabid Brains

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”.

Things I have learned about learning

Do you see what comes of all this running around, Mr. Bond? All this jumping and fighting, it’s exhausting!

Raoul Silva, Skyfall (2012)

Sometimes the tech industry is overwhelming. It seems like we drink from a fire-hose of new frameworks, languages, methodologies, things “considered harmful”, paradigms, tools and on and on and … oh, I need to lie down!

Managing all of this mostly involves learning how to filter incoming information while minimizing the anxiety that we are falling behind or are in some other way unworthy. I have waded through said anxiety for a number of years now and I have picked up a few useful ways of filtering. I have learned most of this by doing it wrong. I would like to share it here so you can at least do it wrong in a different and more exciting way.

Getting to grips with social good in Rabid's Philosophy

One of the most challenging topics we talk about is blending a sense of doing good along with what we do here. Rabid is a commercial company - we make a profit and are proud of the value we create in doing it. As founders, we also care deeply about the impact that our work has and believe that we can do better in future. With a great team that’s growing, and a growing number of clients, I’m well aware of the need to maintain a sense of identity that people can understand as recognisably “us”.

On changing languages, frameworks and teams.

“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere” - Chinese Proverb

Hi. I’m Ben Bradshaw, I’m a geek, coder, Firefly fan and a bunch of other things including the newest Rabid employee in Wellington. It’s been close to 4 months since I started here and in that time I’ve changed programming languages, frameworks and teams not to mention offices, clients, and generally everything.

We acquired a company.

That’s so cool.

OK, OK, so it isn’t a big company, but it is an awesome one.

Resistor’s principals, James and Henry, are impressive senior-senior devs who’ve worked on a bunch of interesting projects, both in their pre-Resistor careers and then in developing the Resistor team. Resistor’s team has a broad background and can take on nearly anything, from innovative core software for startups to architecting large enterprise development.