It really is. There's no magic involved. Again and again I come across articles from people complaining about the current interview practices. They complain it doesn't give you enough depth into the candidate's ability, personality etc. That it measures the wrong qualities. Or that it just doesn't work and bad people keep coming through the pipeline. Well, instead of complaining how about you change it? I'm talking about hiring software engineers here so the first rule you should keep in mind is that you need to get them to write code.

So I had just finished writing this feature. I was confident it’d work - after all I had a good level of tests around it. It sounded like yet another successful deployment. One week in and something starts breaking. It was hard to track down but at the end I realised it was caused by having concurrent processes running in parallel. That’s what happened in a recent production release at our current client.

I’ve been working fulltime with Git for a while now and I’ve noticed a pattern of commands that emerge every so often, but not often enough that would make me remember them. That’s why I decided to post them here so I know where to look in the future. And of course they can turn out to be useful to someone else too. So without further ado, here they are:

I just finished migrating my blog from wordpress to nanoc using a customized version of nanoc3_blog and it feels nice. I grew tired of keeping up with Wordpress' updates and this migration also means that I can finally get rid of php on my vps. However, do let me know if there is anything weird around here. The whole customization done on nanoc3_blog was related to the wordpress migration.

It seems like it was yesterday that I wrote about my next big challenge: Moving to Australia to join ThoughtWorks. Since then a year has passed and I thought I'd share a little bit about what it's been like so far. The first thing you notice when joining ThoughtWorks is that you're surrounded by smart, opinionated people. It was once common for me to be the one fighting for automated testing, TDD, Ruby and overall finding new and better ways of doing what we do - but imagine how different it is to join a team that takes that for granted.

This is just another one of those boring weekends where I felt the need to hack on something. If you follow Google Chrome's blog you're probably aware of this little nifty feature they started to implement in their latest builds: HTML5 voice recognition. And that's when it struck me: "Hey, what if I use that and tweet with my voice instead of typing?" The result of this hacking session is LoudParrot, a sample Rails app that shows how to do just that.

As in many web apps out there, this week I needed a date range picker. I shopped around and while I did find a couple of good options they were (a) too clunky and (b) didn't prevent you from selecting invalid ranges. The latter being the one I was really interested in. So I coded up something simple that worked and looked nice and decided to share around. It's the jquery-daterange-picker.

Following the staggering success of the online version of RottingNames - where by success I mean the handful of metal heads constantly using the app :) - I released the iPhone version for free . You can now generate crazy and fun names anywhere! Go get it! I've been meaning to post this for a while but I was waiting to have some free time and add a few new features to the app, which I just realised won't happen any time soon given the priorities I have at the moment.

Since I started working with Ruby about 4 years ago, I've used quite a few text editors and ide's: RadRails, gedit + plugins, TextMate and Vim. TextMate is the one I've used the most and it's been ok for a long time. Until you realize you need half a dozen bundles to make it really useful for ruby development. Obviously the same goes for Vim and gedit. Oh, and forget about refactoring.

Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation on the whole Clouds Against the Floods thing at the Ruby on Rails Oceania User Group here in Sydney. Those guys are awesome and they recorded the talk - thanks guys! If you'd like to download the slides, they're available on Slideshare. Enjoy! ;)