by cbq

Live from StartupRiot MAKE

Published February 18, 2012 in Community

The StartupRiot MAKE event kicked off last night at ATDC with the help of Sanjay Parekh and some very awesome sponsors and teams.

We're happy to be a part of this awesome event. At 5 pm on Friday, teams started trickling in and sponsors started setting up displays. The food arrived and many people began networking and planning already.

At 6 pm, Sanjay announced the teams, and each team got up and spoke about what they were building, and what they needed -- be it a designer, some mobile development help, or back-end development.

by cbq

Tech Talk on Visualizing Scaling

Published February 17, 2012 in Tech Demos

This week's Tech Talk was on Visualizing Scaling, and Consistent Hashing techniques for scaling data.

Patrick talked through several visualizations he created in HTML5 to visually explain many common scaling techniques.

If you've heard of the techniques and algorithms: "sharding" or "master-slave", or even "consistent hashing" for distributing data across servers, but never really known how they work, this talk goes through the basics and shows visually how data can be scaled out across multiple servers.

by jon

If the Shoe Fits, Ship it!

Published February 17, 2012 in ROWE Sales Business

In January of 2012, after spending the holidays 'funemployed' (OK, just on vacation) down in sunny Florida logging some EPIC miles, I very excitedly boarded the Highgroove ROWE-boat as our first Account Director.

The month of January left me dazed but not confused. Working in a ROWE environment means results are expected immediately (and that results are all that matter). I hit the ground running and quickly found that everyone here is equally vested each project's success. That is to say, pardon the pun: "the rising tide lifts all boats" here at Highgroove. By leveraging constant communication, the best tools, pair programming, code audits, and project retrospectives -- we truly are an agile shop.

Read on to find out how I learned about what we do best, what makes us different, and what that means to me as our Account Director.

by jonathan

You Must Teach To Be Taught

Published February 14, 2012 in Community Code Awesome Hosting Speaking

Waaaayyy back in December, I had the pleasure of attending a code retreat. In that post, I discussed what I learned.

This month, I had the pleasure of facilitating a code retreat a few weeks ago. Thanks to Highgroove, TapJoy, FourAthens, and my co-coordinator Travis Douce, the Athens Code Retreat was a resounding success.

Also, a special shout out to our Code Retreat homies in South Africa led by Corey Haines, who handed off the baton to us late in their day but early in ours.

Read on to find out how lessons learned from facilitating compares to attending, how the general "You" actually means "I" in the blog title, and how many times it takes (me) to learn the four rules of simple design.

by stafford

Mailcatcher: Making email testing a breeze

Published February 09, 2012 in Ruby Open Source Testing Awesome

One of my least favorite chores as a developer is dealing with email. I’m not talking about my inbox. That is a post for another day ;). I’m talking about emails sent by web applications. Whether it is a sign up confirmation email, a receipt from a purchase, or reminder for your dog’s birthday. Chances are, if you have a web application, it sends email.

Traditionally, my workflow for testing these emails has not been very elegant or even efficient. It would either involve creating a bunch of users with different emails accounts I own, or telling the back-end to send all emails to my email address. While both of these work to some extent, the former is very time consuming and the later isn’t really testing the system the way it is meant to be used.

Mailcatcher one-ups both of these methods big time. Mailcatcher provides you with a local SMTP server for you to send your emails to in your development environment. Mailcatcher also provides you with a webmail interface to view all the emails your system has sent.

by david

Red, Green, Refactor - The Tools For Success

Published February 07, 2012 in Ruby Ruby On Rails Iterative Development Keeping It Simple Code Testing

It's easy to say "We're agile" and "We use Behavior/Test Driven Development" and thus "we use the right tools to empower our developers!" but what are those tools? For me that discussion is entirely about the tool stack you choose, how that stack empowers you as a developer to do things right the first time. Luckily thanks to the ruby community as a whole we have a large number of high-quality choice to choose between.

by andy

Kumbaya, My Award

Published January 31, 2012 in Business Awesome

At Highgroove, we love giving each other compliments. In fact, since everyone at Highgroove kicks ass in some way, compliments are constantly flying around (actually, I think that in and of itself was a compliment).

Well-deserved compliments foster teamwork, increase morale, and make us better as a team than we could be on our own.

One specific way we compliment one another is by giving the Highgroove Award. The award can be given by anyone to anyone; the recipient is recognized on the website and with a physical trophy (it's a bit over the top on purpose!).

Read on for how we added a technical twist to giving the award.

by stafford

Great Office Rearrangement: Sit where you want

Published January 27, 2012 in ROWE

At Highgroove we are are always trying out new ways to improve our process and environment. One of my favorite experiments has been doing away with assigned seats. Our Results Only Work Environment allows each person to decide when and where they do their work. While it is true no one is required to come into the office, the reality is many people prefer to be in the office. It is not hard to see why. Every member of the team gets a massive monitor, a super comfy Aeron chair, and all the espresso and snacks anyone could ever need. Although most people come into the office regularly, each team member's hours can vary wildly. When we had assigned seats you could come in the office and be isolated just because your neighbors on a different schedule. Conversely, you could come in and be surrounded by a couple developers talking out a difficult problem when you really need to get something else done. In short, assigned seats just aren't very ROWE.

by cbq

Tech Talk on Brakeman

Published January 27, 2012 in Tech Demos

Dave's Tech Talk this week is on security on web applications, focusing on Ruby on Rails applications, and using the static analysis security scanner called Brakeman (brakeman on github).

In this talk, Dave looks at how static security analyzers work, and how we used it to find some very tiny (already fixed within a few minutes of finding) possible security weak-points in an application we built for a client.

by cbq

Hack Night at Highgroove

Published January 26, 2012 in Hack Night

Highgroove hosted our monthly Hack Night, and with 20 attendees, this was our largest yet.

Hack Nights are a chance for Highgroovers to simply "hack" which means: to experiment, learn, and play with technologies we might not get to during our day-to-day. So, what did we hack on?