Before I get into the details of finding your next rails developer, I thought a bit of background would be worth sharing. One of the earliest tactical mistakes I made as I developed my web platform at BiggerPockets was to convert the application from PHP to Ruby on Rails. I was fairly skilled in PHP, and what I didn’t know, I could at least hack . . . with Rails, I’m just completely out of touch. While I’ve been very happy with Rails overall, this all presents one major problem:

I can’t review code from developers to determine the quality of their work. This applies both to code written for our site and to code that a potential developer submits to me in reviewing their candidacy to work for me.

In working with dozens of independent contractor developers over the past 5 years, I’ve had the full gamut of talent: from absolute crap to amazing — astonishingly, many of the crap coders have had fantastic references.

So what can someone like me do?

Frankly, I think it is somewhat of a roll of the dice for someone to hire a developer when they don’t have a background in that language, but over time you do get better. I hope that my learning curve can help someone else, which is why I’m sharing the information below, which should come in handy for anyone who needs to hire a rails developer.

Where to find Rails Developers: The List

Here’s a list of websites that I recommend you use to find your next rails programmer. Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list.

The Rails Job Sites

• *RubyNow – RubyNow’s job board has typically brought the best response out of any site I’ve posted to. If I had one place to post, this would be my choice.
• Startuply – This job board for startup companies has been a great resource for finding talent. I always get a good set of candidates when I post here.
• ODesk – I’m a huge fan of Odesk and have found several of my favorite rails developers through the site. There are a ton of upstarts here, but there are definitely a few diamonds in the mix.
• RubyInside – This is the one site here that is not free, but I’ve heard good things. I just have a hard time paying the $249 for a 60 day posting.
• Railswork – I’ve never had a fantastic response in terms of quantity, but I have gotten some decent resumes from this site.
• Railsjob – Like Railswork, I haven’t gotten a ton of people to respond to my postings here, but the quality was good — usually at too high a price for me, though.
• Craigslist – I’ve found that the quality of submissions through Craigslist are usually pretty poor. Typical respondents have been newbie coders or folks from Southeast Asia.
• Masterbranch – Another free rails job site. I’ve posted there once with zero responses.
• RailsJobs.co.uk – I haven’t used this one, but it looks to be fairly active.
• Startupers – Another resource I haven’t yet tried
• RailsLodge – Not a ton of listings here, but another free source you can try.

Here are a few ways to do your due diligence on a Rails developer:

1. Check them out on WorkingwithRails. The higher the authority and popularity someone has on the site, the better (most of the time)
2. Check to determine if they have made contributions back to Rails. You can do that by looking for them on the Ruby on Rails Contributors page.
3. Are they on GitHub? The site is the go-to version control destination for Rails programmers and is a great place to check to see if someone is an active programmer or to see if they are giving back to the Rails community at large by contributing to OpenSource Rails projects.
4. Of course, you’ll want to interview previous employers.
5. We will typically include very specific instructions in our job posts and request access to any open source code that they have written or any other code that isn’t covered by an NDA, amongst other things. This is actually a great test to determine whether an applicant has an eye for detail and following directions. Amazingly, I’d say that at least 50%-60% of people who apply for a given job posting I place ignore these instructions.

Keep in mind that you’re going to find developers that have an hourly rate starting from $10-$20 — typically from Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia all the way up to folks asking for $150 and above (mostly here in the States). What I’ve discovered, though, is that rate doesn’t always determine skill. I’ve seen many developers who charge near the upper end of the scale, whose skills are trumped by guys asking a more reasonable rate.

What is important to know is that most developers will drop their rate for long-term projects. Steady work at less money will – in the long run – likely end up being more profitable for someone than doing a handful of jobs for a higher rate with lots of lead time in between.

Just be sure to ask a ton of questions, do your homework, conduct an interview to ensure they don’t do the big rails development no-no’s, and make sure to discuss your working styles, the tools you use, communication, etc. before making a hire. Any of these can make or break your working relationship with a developer. If you have no idea where to even begin in putting your ideas together and how to present them in order to properly work with your programmer, then be sure to check out this guide.

The Horror Stories: Just for Fun!

I’ve had my fair share of horror stories when it comes to developers. Here are a few tidbits/highlights (or low-lights); keep in mind that in between the bad, there have certainly been a handful of very talented people who have had my back over the years.

- I had one developer who was very talented and who was working around 20/hrs per week for me on an ongoing basis. One day he told me that he was going to go to a conference back east for a few days, but would be back a few days later. When he didn’t get in touch for the next few days, and didn’t respond to me by phone, email, etc., I got worried and called the conference to see if they knew if anything happened to him. It turned out that he wasn’t going for a conference, but a job interview, and got arrested while he was over there. I don’t need to get into the details, but clearly I had to let him go.
- Another developer who was seemingly quite skilled, turned out to be a complete nightmare. One day he decided that I didn’t know what I was doing running my business, and he told me that I should essentially turn the keys over to him to make decisions because he was much more competent than I was. I was actually amused to hear his crazed rantings, but clearly had to give him the boot. Ironically, he has applied for several job postings I’ve made since then.
- One guy who was amazing on paper got working and actually broke everything that he touched. It took weeks to undo the damage he caused by his incompetence.
- Many freelancers have disappeared in the middle of jobs.

Do you have any rails sites you recommend for finding someone? What about your screening process? Did I miss anything? Finally, do you have any horror stories? Please share!

Introducing Technorati’s WTF aka Where’s The Fire

I don’t think it has quite caught on yet, but Technorati has built it’s own answer to Digg, Reddit and the rest of the social news and bookmarking sites. It’s called Where’s The Fire or WTF and covers “What’s Hot, and Why.” Considering the popularity and resources of Technorati, it seems like this should be more popular than it already is . . .

WTF Manipulation

Unfortunately, it seems like people are already manipulating the system. I was just looking and there were 4 stories on the front page of the site all promoting some blog (that is a huge POS). Each story had 15 votes and they were all in different categories for added exposure. WTF’s competition already has methods for dealing with situations like these, and if Technorati doesn’t handle the problem FAST, then it is likely that this application will turn out to be a complete flop.

User Manipulating Technorati’s WTF

If Technorati hopes to gain any ground on the competition for social bookmarking/social news, then they need to get a grip on this ASAP. In addition, publicity is going to be key . . . if no one knows about WTF, then it will never become popular (pretty obvious, I know).

Meanwhile, feel free to vote on and support some of the articles I’ve posted to WTF, or just submit some yourself!

Looks like MySpace wants to go back to its roots and launch another crappy product without style or functionality. The recently launched their MySpace News Beta (of course they had to include the uber-lame BETA tag – more about BETAs in another post), which looks like a really poorly modified Pligg clone. You would think that with all it’s resources, NewsCorp would make sure they had a good product before putting out an ugly piece of junk like this, but nothing seems to surprse me anymore.

The site, steals borrows the now famous Digg voting system and presents blog posts and news stories (I have yet to see anything other than a blog post) for users to read and review. The output is just poorly designed. While I do appreciate the vast number of categories the site offers, and the events options (they aggregate events from Backpage, CitySearch, amongst others) I don’t really see any reason to rate an event that I, nor anyone else has attended. It just makes no sense. I see nothing else about the site that I like.

In addition, when I attempted to include my blog’s feed to the site, it simply timed out. I tried again later with another blog and got the same result. I realize its a “BETA”, but these kinds of problems won’t win the MySpace team any kind of good buzz.

According to Playfuls.com:

The news feature of MySpace is built using Newroo technology, a company they acquired in early 2006 for a rumored $7 million. Newroo never had the chance of displaying the merits of its technology in public because of the acquisition.

I’m not sure, but I think they got ripped off. I’m pretty sure this could be developed for somewhere around $.75 (not a fan, can’t you tell?)

Here are some other links to thoughts about this new site:
- MySpace News Kinda Sucks
- Social Media Now: MySpace News Not Ready for Prime Time
- MySpace added News aggregation
- Will MySpace News Ever Fly? (The Answer May Surprise You)
- After the (brief) Honeymoon: MySpace News Still Sucks
- MySpace News: failure to launch, no one is reading

Introducing Shopify, A Hosted eCommerce Solution

I just found out about a cool new ecommerce solution called Shopify. The site is a beautifully designed web 2.0, Ruby on Rails hosted ecommerce site. According to the few reviews that I found about the site, setup was extremely quick and easy.

The site is free to use, and you are only charged a 3% commission once a sale is complete. This can drop down to 2% if you sell over $10,000 in goods. Users can use Paypal or a merchant account to handle payment and everything from security to maintenance is handled by the Shopify team.

From what I saw, all of the ecommerce shopping sites created with shopify look incredible. They are attractive and easy to navigate. Other key features that caught my eye were: timeline based order tracking and the ability to track orders through an RSS feed.

The biggest problem I see is that it is a hosted solution. In its current form, I would have no way to set up a shop on my server using Shopify. I’d have to send all my traffic to their site (my subdomain) if I used them. This presents a problem for me.

It looks like I’ll be passing on Shopify, and another hosted solution I found called RightCart, but if you don’t care if you host your own shop, I think it is certainly worth a look.

Here are a few other reviews of the site:
TechCrunch: Shopify was worth the wait
CNet: Shopify makes quick work of setting up shop

Sample Shopify Website:
Conrad’s Coffee Company

I found a great mod for phpBB forum administrators. This particular mod will ban any user who registers for your forum from a particular time zone. I’m not sure if many newbies to phpBB are aware, but most SPAM registrations come from GMT-12 Timezone. If you can prevent users from registering from that zone, you’ll go a long way to stop these SPAM-Bots.

Ban User Registration Based on TimeZone aka. SpamBot Timezone Registration Mod

Just alter the timezone range to prevent bots and people from zones you don’t want them coming from.

#
#—–[ OPEN ]——————————————
#
includes/usercp_register.php
#
#—–[ FIND ]——————————————
#
$sql = “SELECT MAX(user_id) AS total
#
#—–[ BEFORE, ADD ]——————————————
#
if (($user_timezone < -5) || ($user_timezone > 5))
{
$message = ‘Sorry, you appear to have triggered our spam security system. Please go back and modify some of the information and try again.

To give you a hint, we only accept registrations from people based in (or near) the GMT time zone area.

‘;
message_die(GENERAL_MESSAGE, $message);
}
#
#—–[ CLOSE/SAVE ALL FILES ]—————————————
#

Thanks to InertaM for sharing this with everyone.

I’ve been suffering a bit here with my new iMac. Everything is perfect, except I’m lacking an adequate feed reader / aggregator. I’m currently using an aggregator called Vienna, a RSS reader for Mac OS X, but it does not compare to FeedReader (the PC reader I’ve been using).

Vienna lacks the ability to easily recognize new feeds if you enter a website’s URL (not the feed’s). Every other good aggregator I’ve used has this functionality. There are a few other annoyances (inability to easily remove read articles quickly), but I haven’t found a suitable replacement.

BTW – I know everyone is raving about the web based reader from Google, but I prefer a stand-alone application on my desktop.

Anyone know of a good reader?

I’ve been trying to find a new look for my real estate wiki, but have had no luck while searching for templates. I realized I’d have to look for “wiki skins.” After some searching, I found a great resource with a bunch of great ones.

If you’re looking to change your wiki’s look, here is another resource with more styles.

Building a Wiki Site
Last month I mentioned that I was looking into setting up a Wiki and that I had chosen MediaWiki to do so. Since then, I’ve set up my first wiki (it is a work in progress), a real estate wiki. The set up was really easy – like most scripts, the basic install just required setting up a php/mySQL database, a few configurations, and we were ready. Modifying the script and learning how to run and manage the wiki took a bit longer. I’m still feeling my way around, but I’m pleased with how it is turning out!

Creating My First eCommerce Website
Just to make things a bit more complex for myself, I’ve decided to create an ecommerce site – my first – as a complement to one of my other sites. I’ve made half-hearted attempts in the past to do this, but this time is different. After some initial research, I’ve narrowed my shopping cart script choices to OSCommerce and Zen Cart. I felt like they both had the largest support base and it appears like they are two of the most touted shopping cart solutions.

Now that I’ve got the initial first steps figure out, I’m totally lost when it comes to ecommerce. I’ve explored the forums at both Zen Cart and OS Commerce, and I’ve searched for tutorials / blogs that help walk you through setting up your own ecommerce site, but have failed to find anything halfway decent. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know. Regardless, I will do my best to try and explain how to go about doing it, once I’ve got it figured out. Wish me luck!