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”.

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”.