Rails is not for beginners, what can we do about it?

These are the slides from a talk I did in the RubyUnderground meetup in Israel.
The talk is mainly about the growing need in Rails developers but trying to recruit in a wrong way, without a real education process inside the company.
I talk about how my consultancy/development company is doing that, how we grow new rails developers in house etc...

In the talk I have 3 slides of companies that try to recruit, I mean no harm by putting the posts there, I am just trying to emphasize what the problem is.

Transcript

1. ݆ૉ Rails is not for beginners What can we do about it? Avi Tzurel Kenso
2. puts “me” * 10 Owner - Kenso ݆ૉ Ruby & Rails advisor - Tikal ~3 years of Ruby & Rails experience ~300 in the world in rails commit # http://kensodev.com http://twitter.com/kensodev http://github.com/kensodev
3. Current status: Explosion • Demand for Ruby/Rails developers was never higher • 50%> startups choose Ruby/Rails for their product • BIG on open source
4. CANT
6. FIND
8. DEVELOPERS
10. Holding it wrong! Recruiting is completely broken Not enough knowledge to “manage” developers
11. ARGH!!!!
12. OR... a proper response
14. Not a nasty response, a proper response
16. There’s a much better way
17. Proven to work (Working like that for 18 months)
19. “... We encourage improvement and for people to live up to the state-of-art... “
20. HOW?
21. }
22. 4-5 apprentices Craftsman / Journeyman }
23. TDD
24. Teaching Driven Development
25. FDD
26. Feedback Driven Deployment
27. Pair program 20% of the time
28. Best Practice from the get go
29. Problems are solved during 1-1 mentoring process
30. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
31. Peer code review for all code going into production
35. NಠಠB on boarding!
36. Dojo
37. Yes sensey!
38. Work on production code right away!
39. Recorded 1-1 sessions or Dojo’s for generations to come
40. No question is too stupid!
41. Production will fall
42. Open source EVERYTHING!
43. Share the knowledge
44. Show me theTools
45. Use tools to make your job easier
47. Github • Code hosting • Inline code commenting • Email replies • Pull requests
49. Pivotal Tracker • Sprint planning • Commit hooks as comment to stories • Open source git_tracker • feature/some_feature_#2323234 • Will post commits into the story as comments • Can Finish/Deliver/Start the story with commits
50. Time Tracking • Track time on all tasks • Check bottlenecks at the end of each sprint • Cross reference time with commits + stories • Beautiful clear reports at the end of sprint/month
51. Summing up • Homogeneous team • Craftsman / Journeyman + 4-5 developers • Mentoring / Teaching driven • Pair programming • Full transparency of the work process
52. Bonus!
53. Giving back Hosting a monthly meetup Recorded as a screencast Building a real-life product from scratch http://he.kensodev.com
54. Questions?