It’s been a whirlwind month, to say the least. At the end of September, I had multiple client projects wrapping up, a rapidly approaching deadline for the Rails World app, and wrapping up a paid mentorship engagement. All of this is on top of planning international travel for the first time.

While not exactly what I’d call ‘relaxing’, I would say the conference has me feeling a bit rejuvenated afterward like these types of events usually do.

Dealing with multiple smaller engagements at once was resulting in too much context-switching and administrative tasks and have been thinking about ways I can be more protective of my time.

Posts

Still sitting at a big ol’ goose egg on this one. With everything going on the past month, I haven’t found much free time or had any specific topics I really wanted to write about. I have been kicking around some ideas to get back to writing so hoping to have some more out next month.

Ruby Conf Proposal

Unfortunately, my proposal for Ruby Conf wasn’t accepted. With an updated format, there were fewer open slots open this year than in the past so things were tighter than ever. Either way, I’m really happy with the proposal I put together and have some plans to use this content for some other projects. Since Ruby Conf has always seemed like the place where career and community talks are the best received, I’m not sure if I’ll re-submit this or try out some other ideas.

I can’t remember where or how I came across this site, but it was really helpful reading through other proposals to get an idea of what I should be shooting for. I got a ton of help from these proposals and wanted to include mine as well.

​https://speakerline.io/proposals/7713​

Rails World

7:30 -> 8:45 -> 9:30 -> 10:00 -> 10:30 -> 11:00 -> 11:30 - 12:00 -> 12:30 -> Canceled

These were my scheduled departure times for my flight from JFK to Amsterdam. With all those smaller delays, I tried to calm my nerves by strolling around the terminal. I’m typically a pretty anxious traveler and hate airports so this turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. I think I ended up walking somewhere around 13 miles total.

By the time things were finally canceled and I made my way to the hotel provided by the airline, it was about 1:30 AM, and needed to sort out my flights for the next day.

While the airline did re-book me out of Boston, for my flight to Amsterdam, after paying for any type of upgraded seat for the first time in my life, I noticed I was in the middle at the back of the plane. Not going to work.

Instead of calling my airline, I called the credit card company that I booked my travel through. Having spent a few years in call centers, I’m not the worst at talking myself into upgrades or out of fees and charges. Most of the time you just have to ask and be empathic that there’s a person on the other end that’s just trying to get through their day.

After about 30 minutes I had my upgraded seats back on a flight out of Boston but had to have a 5 hour layover which I was fine with.

The upside is, that I was so exhausted, I really only had to deal with jet lag one of the nights since most of the time I was so exhausted, I was able to sleep whenever.

I landed in Amsterdam around 9:00 AM local time, which meant the first scheduled event was set to start in 9 hours so spent some time checking over things as soon as I got to my hotel room. All in all, the developers on the project did an outstanding job. We noticed a couple of issues with displaying talks as ‘Past’ as soon as the start date was in the past. We tried a couple of fixes the morning of the conference to improve that, but without having a section in the app for talks currently happening, we ended up reverting those changes and have it on our list to address in the future. During the conference, the app performed pretty well. There were a few spikes where we broke 90% CPU usage but for the most part, memory, and CPU usage was around 50%.

While not technically error-free, the only reported errors I saw during the conference were some errors on invalid CSRF tokens. My guess is that the app re-started after the user viewed the page and performed their action without refreshing.

I think this is a great testament to the power of Rails and how you can get some great results from newer developers if you give them the tools and resources to be successful. 2 early career developers working part-time on their first ‘production’ project shipped an app to support an international conference in a couple of months.

Imagine what you could do with bringing people like this on your team full-time. If you’re interested in learning more about how you or your team can hire and successfully onboard junior developers, I’d love to talk to you.

Fun stuff and wrapping up the year.

Now that Rails World and some other smaller client engagements have wrapped up, I’m reclaiming some of my free time to work on some personal projects again. I’m trying to keep riding that post-conference hype wave and try to think about what’s in store for me next.

This is also my hunker-down time of the year where I seem to have my most productive stretches of work so I’m hoping to make some progress on a couple of projects I’ve had in mind.

Not to be the type of person to skip holidays but I've already bought my permit to cut some Christmas trees in a section National Forest near my house so the holidays will be here in no time.

If you're working on any interesting projects or would like to chat about anything I'm working on, you can just reply to this email.