Lark Group

Rails Release Dates

Given recent events, it’s about time to migrate this list over and update it. So, I present the history of Rails version release dates from darkest prehistory to the present:

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My (Web) Tools of the Trade

“Software as a Service” isn’t quite so much of a buzzword as it was a couple of years ago. But online tools still fit into my workflow quite a bit. Here’s what I’m currently using, with some opinionated notes.

• Google Voice – Back when this used to be Grand Central, I was reasonably happy with this all-in-one phone service. But in the 18 months or so that Google’s owned it, development has been moribund. The only serious added feature is voicemail transcription, and it doesn’t work worth a damn (I have never gotten a voicemail transcription from Google Voice that was good enough to convey the message). Really, the only reason I haven’t moved to one of the commercial competitors is that porting a number out of GV is insanely difficult and changing phone numbers is a pain in the butt.

• Cashboard – I’m using this one for time-tracking and invoicing; I like it better than Freshbooks. The OS/X Dashboard widget works fine for me for time-tracking, though it drives my staff crazy because they forget to record time before rebooting. Online time-tracking is largely a failure with every system I’ve tried, but coordinating a distributed team with client-side tools is nigh unto impossible.

• Hoptoad – We use Hoptoad for online error tracking on lots of projects; it works fine, and the pricing is reasonable. Occasionally it just stops sending emails on one project or another for some mysterious reason. We’ve used Exceptional as well, but we don’t like their UI as much.

• APIdock – Still my site of choice for checking on the Ruby or Rails APIs. There are a bazillion alternatives, of course.

• Github – I used GitHub quite heavily as a paid user for a while there, but now I’m back down to the free account. The majority of features they’ve introduced recently don’t seem to actually help on my projects, and some of the attitude issues their staff have displayed on Twitter and elsewhere have alienated me.

• Codaset – This is what I’m using for paid git hosting these days. So far service is good, pricing is reasonable, and it’s got the features that I actually use.

• Pivotal Tracker – We have a bazillion projects on Pivotal, and we’d pay in an instant if they dropped the free plan. It’s a well-designed tool for agile management. One thing drives me absolutely batshit crazy though: their continued insistence on not having any sort of flexible workflow. This has me trying out alternatives, because their one-size-fits-all workflow really doesn’t.

• AgileZen – Currently the leading candidate to replace Pivotal in my project management. They’ve got a nice Kanban-style system with the added bonus of allowing you to define additional workflow states. I’ve used it on a couple of small projects and may soon use it to spin up a large one.

• Basecamp – Everyone knows Basecamp, right? I’ve got a few clients who want to manage their projects on Basecamp, so I use it from time to time. I’m not a fan, though; I find the UI confusing and many of the features are just clutter for the way I want to do things.

• FogBugz – I’ve got a soft spot for FogBugz; I did after all write a book about it. I’ve got one client using it right now, and a second evaluating. It does fine for heavyweight issue tracking and long-range planning, but it’s a bad fit for an agile process because it only provides a limited number of priority buckets for sorting things.

• BrowserCam – I use BrowserCam for remote access to a variety of different browsers. It’s expensive and slow, but it saves me from installing Windows on any of my computers.

• Pingdom – I use Pingdom for 24×7 uptime monitoring of a bunch of sites. There are cheaper alternatives, but I haven’t found any that are as reliable.

• Campfire – Another tool I use when the client insists on it. It’s tolerable when used with Propane as a frontend, but I don’t find it to offer any clear benefits over IRC with a decent client.

• Flowdock – My current preferred alternative for group chats. It’s currently in beta, and you really need to use it with an SSB to have it be a useful tool, but it works fine for me. Feature development seems stalled, though, which is worrisome.

• Scout – I’m using Scout to monitor load and performance on half a dozen servers, and it does the trick fine. A lot less pricy than New Relic, though it lacks some of the latter’s advanced features and deep integration with Rails.

• RightSignature – Electronic signatures for documents are a big win for me; I do enough contracts and NDAs that this one saves me its cost in saved time.

• Skype – I detest Skype, but some of my teams use it for group chats. I won’t take Skype phone calls; the quality is just too awful. In fact, let’s face it, the rise of VOIP has pretty much destroyed the chance of high-quality voice phone calls. This is especially a problem for those of us with hearing frequency lost due to too much loud music in our errant youth.

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Lark Group is Growing!

Welcome to the new Lark Group site. For years, Lark was just myself. But recently the four of us – Mike Gunderloy, Mike Breen, Dana Jones, and Russell Norris – have been working together on an increasing number of web projects, mostly using Ruby on Rails. We’ve built whole new sites from scratch, improved the work of other developers, and rescued some troubled projects from extinction. With skills ranging from backend database optimization all the way to front end user interface design, we’re prepared to help out any part of your project as well.

We’re mixing three things together for this site:

1. This Blog section will contain what you’d expect from a blog: longer thoughts that we hope are of interest to Rails developers or to those using their services.
2. The Resources section to the right will continue the tradition of pointing out useful bits of code and sites for developers that Mike G started over on A Fresh Cup.
3. And, of course, if you have a project that could use our help, check out our services.

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