PayrollHero At RailsConf 2013 – Our Favorite Talks And Resources

Last week we were in Portland for the 8th annual RailsConf, the largest gathering of Ruby on Rails developers in the world. For some of us it was a return visit to RailsConf and to Portland, but for most it was the first time and the general consensus was the same; that RailsConf is a very unique mix of social, educational and hands-on learning events.

PayrollHero at RailsConf

“I’ve mostly been to single vendor conferences before, but RailsConf was a nice change, it’s much more community driven,” – Piotr Banasik, Engineering (Co-Founder).

RailsConf 2013 was not the only reason we were stoked to be south of the border in Portland, Oregon. The City of Roses is also the only place you can get Voodoo Doughnuts, it has over 30 microbreweries and as a result hundreds of specialist ales, it boasts an impressive lineage of tech history and has been nicknamed the ‘Silicon Forest’ because of it’s inspiring landscape  – all in all, we felt right at home. And the home we stayed in was pretty awesome, too.

Rental House in Portland for Rails ConfOur House Portland RailsConfFun in the kitchen at the RailsConf house in Portand

The Best Bits of RailsConf 2013

With more than 20 talks a day, the conference was a real immersion into what the Ruby on Rails community had been doing, thinking and achieving for the last year.  It was tough to slim it down to these eight favourites, as chosen by our very own Payroll Hero Adventure Engineers.

1. Volatiles and Stables – Michael Lopp

“It was great hearing about the need for volatiles and stables in a company, it certainly gives you a fresh perspective on the skills of your colleagues and yourself.” – Dane Natoli, Engineer.

In this talk, Michael proposed that a business needs two kinds of engineers, Volatiles and Stables, and that both play a major role in productivity and innovation. He outlined that ‘stables’ play nice with others, are careful and work to mitigate failure; whereas, ‘volatiles’ define strategy rather than follow it, do not see failure as an option and see risk as a thrill. It certainly got each of us thinking about which box we fall into.

Recommended Reading: head over to Michael’s blog post on the topic here at RandsinRepose.com to find out if you are a volatile or stable; or even just to learn how to juggle the two personalities efficiently in the workplace.

2. Describing Your World with Seahorse – Trevor Rowe

“Seahorse looks like a very promising cross platform API framework, we’re curious how it will evolve over time. With Amazon Web Services behind it it should at least maintain momentum for their own APIs.” – Piotr Banasik, Engineering (Co-Founder).

Trevor Rowe is a software developer at Amazon Web Services, he authored the Seahorse tool, worked on integrating Paperclip with the aws-sdk gem, and has contributed to a variety of other open source projects. Trevor’s talk introduced us to the Seahorse language, a DSL for describing API operations for just about any web service. He introduced us to what Seahorse does and showed us that once you have your API described using Seahorse, you can essentially create an entire API client library with one line of code.

Recommended Reading: Sadly we can’t find any slides for this presentation right now, but if we come across any we will update  this post as well as posting it to our Facebook page.

3. Incremental Design: A conversation with a designer and a developer – Rebecca Miller-Webster and Savannah Wolf

“It was interesting for me to see how design and Engineering interact at another company. I hope to apply some of the learning in PayrollHero’s product development process.” – Adam Baechler, Product Development (Co-Founder)

Rebecca and Savannah addressed two problems that everyone in this industry has faced from time-to-time and asked “developers, how many times have you had to completely rip out your hard earned code for a totally new site design?” and to designers “how many times has a re-design taken four times as long as the developer said it would and not looked good in the end?” The resolution, they proposed, was to change to using an incremental approach to design.

This designer/developer talk walked us through an introduction to incremental design, how to design with incremental changes in mind and how to develop for incremental design, including utilizing SASS, structuring your mark-up and CSS, and structuring your Rails views and partials.

Recommended Reading: Rebecca and Savannah’s slide show on incremental design from RailsConf 2013 is available to read, right here at Speaker Deck. You should dive in today, it will change how you work tomorrow.

 4. No Traffic, No Users, No Problem – Jim Jones

“Jim showed us some cool tools for using Mechanical Turk for Usability testing and definitely gave us some food for thought” – Adam Baechler, Product Development (Co-Founder)

Another talk highly recommended by Adam was ‘No Traffic, No Users, No Problem!” by Jim Jones. “Should the signup button be red or blue? Does my site’s sales pitch sound awkward? What will the user think about my site the first five seconds they visit?”, asked Jim. His talk then walked us through Using Rails and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, how to perform usability tests, A/B testing and how to gain valuable feedback on your site before launching to a single real user.

Recommended Reading: If you’ve never heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or you’re struggling to get valuable usability information with your current methods, you should certainly watch Jim’s slideshow, here on Slideshare.

5. How Shopify Scales Rails – John Duff

“Seeing how Shopify scale having so many request at the same time was very interesting, they had a problem that startups usually don’t have, they just had so much traffic!” – Florent Lamoureux, Front-end Engineer

The first line of code was written for Shopify nearly 10 years ago to power an online Snowboard shop. Now the years have passed and today Shopify powers over 40 thousand online stores, processes up to half a million product sales per day and has over 30 people actively working on Shopify – making it the longest developed and probably the largest Rails code base out there. As a start-up, we really found value in hearing their story of how Shopify has had to evolve to meet its immense growth and the needs of its customers, layer by layer.

Recommended Reading: If you need a quick boost of entrepreneurial inspiration we recommend watching Shopify’s talk on YouTube.

6. Morning Keynote Talk – Yehuda Kats

Yehuda’s talk was a big hit with Suman Mukherjee, one of our Adventure Engineers. Unfortunately, because the talk was morning keynote we have not been able to find any slides to share with you but Suman offers this great, personal evaluation.

“Yehuda’s talk mainly concentrated on how not to write adhoc JavaScript and provide a good structure to it. He pointed out how turbolinks and JavaScript, bound to data attributes, makes the JavaScript clumsy and hard to maintain.” – Suman Mukherjee

Recommended Reading: Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ember.js, Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams and co-author of best-selling jQuery in Action and Rails 3 in Action. He is a very influancial member of our community and we recommend following him at his http://yehudakatz.com/ or on Twitter @wycats

7. From Rails To The Webserver To The Browser – David Padilla

“From Rails to the Browser to the Web Server was very interesting. David taught us about Rails internals and it was great to hear from him how it all works under the hood.” – Florent Lamoureux, Front-end Engineer

David asked a room full of developers “do you know exactly how those HTML documents end up in a browser?” and his talk showed us all of the components that make the magic happen. We dissected the relevant code within Rails, Rack and the thin web server to discover exactly how the web server starts and listens to a TCP port, communicates with Rails and returns the HTML document that your browser parses.

Recommended Reading: If you’d like a bit of practical reading for your lunchbreak or morning commute, David’s slideshow is available to read here, on SpeakerDeck.

8. The Magic Tricks of Testing – Sandi Metz

“Sandi talked about how to write tests that you don’t hate. She focused on what parts of the code should be tested and how certain tests do not provide any value but add maintenance overhead. However she did only talked about unit testing” – Engineering (Founding Team)

Sandi, winner of the Ruby Hero Award, said exactly what we were all thinking “Tests are supposed to save us money, right. How is it, then, that many times they become millstones around our necks, gradually morphing into fragile, breakable things that raise the cost of change?” Sandi’s answer was that we could be writing too many tests and testing the wrong kinds of things. This talk striped away the veil and offered simple, practical guidelines for choosing what to test and how to test it.

Recommended Reading: Finding the right testing balance isn’t magic, but if you still feel as though you’re having the wool pulled over your eyes you should definitely watch Sandi’s slides on ‘The Magic Tricks of Testing’, here on SpeakerDeck.

Well that is the end of our RailsConf 2013 review, we hope you find some of our recommendations useful and valuable in your own work.

But You Didn’t Mention The Talk By…

There was a lot for us to cover, and we picked out only a few of the gems. If there’s a particular talk you’re looking for, most of the presentations can be found here, on GitHub.

 

Move to Whistler For A Career In Software Engineering With PayrollHero

If you were to ask most people in town why they moved to Whistler, British Columbia they would reel off answers like skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking and summer nights by the lake; the rest would say they were on a gap-year and most on a career break, but very few (if any) would say they moved for the perfect job.

Whistler Blackcomb in full summer bloom

With such a transient community Whistler has a bit of bad reputation for employment, but it’s PayrollHero’s goal to change that…one well-paid happy, adventurous employee at a time.

Just in case you still have doubts, later on we’ll introduce you to our most recent success story – Florent Lamoureux, all the way from historic Bordeaux, France.

Keep on reading this post for why more and more career-focused people are moving to Whistler and how, together, we could make it happen for you.

Work to live and live to play

CEB uncovered that one of the top 5 reasons an employee would quit his/her job in 2012 would be to pursue a better ‘work-life balance’. So if you’re already feeling underwhelmed with your current work-life situation, the only way is up when you move to somewhere as recreation-focussed as Whistler, British Columbia.

Swap your stressful highway commute for a walk or a bike ride through acres of lush green coastal temperate rainforest; and on the way home you could even stop for a game of beach volleyball or an evening BBQ at one of four lake-side beaches.

Lost Lake Beach Whistler

* Does this look like the life you’d like?  You should get in touch and tell us a little about yourself. Maybe we could work together.

But isn’t moving stressful?

Psychiatrists Holmes and Rahe listed changing working conditions and moving house in their top 43 most stressful life events for adults. We know moving is never going to be easy, but there are a few things PayrollHero can do to help ease the ‘typical’ stresses of relocation.

 #1 Stress: Finding a house

PayrollHero has staff housing for our new-into-town employees. On arrival Florent and his girlfriend moved into their own apartment right in Whistler village to help them get orientated as quickly as possible.

Florent enjoying is new PayrollHero Staff housing

#2 Stress: That awkward gap between pay checks

In our PayrollHero staff housing, Florent received his first month rent free, second month at 70% off and third month at 50% off! We also have an office meals program to help keep everyone happy and healthy. Our commitment to happy employees doesn’t just stop there, our aim to also to have the highest average wage in Whistler. All added up, that should give you a few months of financial ease to help you settle in.

#3 Stress: Settling in and making friends

Making friends is easy in Whistler because everyone is here for the same reason – to have fun in the outdoors while striking a sustainable work-life balance in the mountains. Our employees enjoy regular activities paid for by PayrollHero, annual staff retreats and access to some of the world’s best biking and hiking trails right outside of our office.

My Move to Whistler: Florent Lamoureux

Florent Lamoureux PayrollHero Engineer

Name: Florent Lamoureux,

Social: @Flrent, Florent on LinkedIn, GitHub

Age: 22

Home: Bordeaux, France

Education: Masters Degree in Computer Sciences

School: SUPINFO International University

Reason for moving to Canada: To spend more time in the great outdoors and perfect his English.

What Florent thinks about his move to Whistler and PayrollHero:

“The slogan of Payroll Hero is ‘optimizing work with happiness’ and that’s something I felt with the company and Mike, right away. They made my move (with my girlfriend) very easy – they even came to pick us up from the airport. Since then I have enjoyed a great work environment, free food at the office and company activities in the summer. From the point of view of my work, I can use my JavaScript, web and mobile knowledge, while learning new skills like Ruby, and attending educational conferences with my co- workers, too.”

Do you feel the pull of the mountains, too? Are you our next PayrollHero Adventure Engineer? We’re always open to meeting new happy creatives from all over the world.

What to do now? Drop us and email right here at support[at]payrollhero.com. Be sure to include all the best bits about yourself and why you think you’d be a good fit at PayrollHero.