Hey Ruby community!
Last night I was tinkering around with some Quartz graphics and made a Ruby screen saver.
~/Library/Screen\ Savers/Like it or want to get in touch? Let me know on Twitter or via the comments section.
Can a person truly be happy at their job? As I pondered this question over several months, I was arriving at a negative conclusion. I had what I considered to be a good job– I made decent money, the benefits were good, my bills were getting paid, and I was living a relatively comfortable life. Something was still lacking, though, and I began to notice I wasn’t happy. I love writing software, and I feel fortunate to have my interests coincide with my profession. I very much enjoy being creative and taking pride in my work. Coding makes me happy. So why wasn’t I?
At the time, I was working for a “closed” company. One, in fact, that practiced stacked ranking, and prohibited contributing work back to open source projects. This company placed no value on developer involvement in feature planning and expected developers to just code what they ask for. All the credit for a successful feature addition would go to the project manager, and all the blame for a problem or failure would land on the developer. Opportunities for learning new technologies and methodologies were practically non-existent as the company demonstrated a strong bias to arcane technologies because that’s “how it’s always been.” This environment was crushing my creativity, and that was something I refused to lose.
My creativity is the core for everything I do. It’s what motivates me. My job wasn’t challenging; it stood as a blockade to learning and creativity. I decided to retain my creativity by beginning work on a free time project; something that would allow me to apply knowledge gained though leisurely studies. This project required a payments solution.
I’ve never liked dealing with payment gateways and wasn’t looking forward to, once again, dealing with companies like PayPal and Authorize.net; whose integration, documentation, agreements, and pricing are vastly overcomplicated. I was looking for one with two specific features. First, I needed to accomplish a payment scenario where I would charge buyer A, then pay out to seller B without being a middleman – a marketplace solution of sorts. Second, I needed the ability to debit bank accounts. I spent several months researching various payments solutions, but results proved disappointing. Some only processed credit cards. Some had vague pricing. Some had horrible documentation. Most were generally very overcomplicated. Many had horrible support. Then, I found Balanced.
Balanced had an IRC channel where I could get support directly from developers. I inquired about ACH debit support and they said they didn’t have the ability yet but that it was on the roadmap for the near future. Since I wasn’t in a hurry, I decided to continue implementing Balanced into my application while they developed the feature I needed. I began by hanging around in the Balanced IRC channel asking questions here and there. I was impressed by the Balanced team’s helpfulness and politeness. On several occasions they directly asked me for my feedback on their style of operation. Balanced completely changed my opinion of working with payment gateways.
In a short space of time, I started to find the Balanced IRC channel to be an enjoyable place to hang out. I appreciated the help I received from them, so I began answering questions in the channel as a means of giving back and saying thanks. This was often followed up by a series of appreciative remarks from several Balanced employees. Before I knew it, my creative outlet had become Balanced. It was like my second job, my fun job. I couldn’t wait to get through the day at that boring company and return home to work on exciting Balanced projects.
It was at about this point when I had a breakthrough. Balanced had been using Github in a very unique way. They used Github issues to not only track problems, but also to openly design features and prioritize them for implementation. I then realized Balanced wasn’t just an open source company, it was an “open company”. My contributions, be it code pull requests, comments, questions, or feature requests, all meant something. I wasn’t just contributing to open source, I was contributing to the company. My creativity was welcomed. I was helping shape Balanced.
I really liked the direction Balanced was going and had a genuine desire to see them grow to become a leading player in the payments industry. I felt honored to contribute to such a great company, help realize their vision, and become a part of the Balanced legacy. The satisfaction I felt drove me to more actively contribute to balanced-ruby and look for other areas where Balanced could possibly benefit from my skills. While hanging out in IRC, a frequent question asked was if Balanced had an iOS library. The answer was always the same- “not yet, but we hope to have one soon!” Since I work a lot with Mac OS X and iOS Objective-C applications, I saw the opportunity to contribute and spent the next few evenings creating balanced-ios. I can only imagine the incredulous surprise that must have ensued when I presented it to Balanced. They openly mentioned me in interviews and articles, thanking me for my work [1]. For weeks they pestered me about paying for my contributions. Each time I replied that I wasn’t motivated by money; I contributed because I believed in Balanced and wanted to see it grow and succeed. They were relentless though, so I asked if I could just have a Balanced t-shirt. They sent me four.
What’s the worth of a t-shirt? The company which employed me showed no appreciation for my work, so I decided to give my work where it would be valued. The t-shirt is my badge of recognition and I consider it to be priceless.
Shortly after the first release of balanced-ios, I was asked if I wanted to work full-time at Balanced. At the time, Balanced had a strict no remote worker policy, so I reluctantly declined because I couldn’t move away from family. This deterrent didn’t change my drive to keep contributing to Balanced, though. Another few months passed, and I started to see more requests for an Android library. So I made balanced-android over the course of a few evenings and gave it to Balanced. I’m not sure what made them rethink their policy, but Balanced again asked me to come work for them, this time as their first remote developer.
I’m now a full-time remote employee at Balanced, and I’m loving every minute of it. In complete contrast to my old job, I’m able to be creative and work on new things to make the payments industry better, especially for marketplaces. It’s refreshing and inspiring to work in an environment where it’s commonplace to hear, “Want to take a whack at it?” when asking about an issue or proposing a feature. I feel that I am a valued member of the company. I asked for a t-shirt, and I got a job, plus much more. I now know that the key to finding happiness in my career isn’t just by doing what I love, but by also being part of a team that openly appreciates everyone’s achievements and gives people the freedom to thrive in their passions.
Discussion on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6529696
1. Why I Made My Payments Startup An Open Company
Balanced adds Andreessen Horowitz and Collaborative…
No, this is not an April Fools’ joke. I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of JewelryBox v1.5. This brings improved compatability with RVM 1.19.x, which contains many major and important changes. Use the in-app updater, or grab it from http://jewelrybox.unfiniti.com
Change log:
- Compatability with newer RVM versions
- Added RVM notes view
- Added binary options to ruby installation view
- Added verify download options to ruby installation view
- Added ability to upgrade rubies
- Added ability to clean gemsets
- Added ability to clean links
- Fixed manually specified compiler flag application
- Fixed crash on launch and crash when no gcc is found
- Fixed grey screen hang when multiple "logs" are found in ruby installation output
- Fixed "About JewelryBox" menu item
- Fixed crash on installing YAML step
- Fixed RVM usage graph calculations
- Fixed RVM usage graph coloring
- Fixed typo in environment synchronization notification
- Improved feedback while removing rubies
- Silence cURL output when downloading rubies
- Silence dot output during ruby installation
So what happened to v1.4.2?
I was finishing up the final touches for 1.4.2 and the RVM team started to introduce a lot of major changes that required updates to JewelryBox. Therefore, I thought it best to delay releasing until the RVM changes became stable and JewelryBox could be updated accordingly.
Thanks to everyone for your patience and support on the JewelryBox project.
Continue reading below for a detailed description of the major changes in v1.5.
JewelryBox v1.5 requires RVM 1.19.1 or newer.
The “Release Notes” view showed information from RVM requirements. RVM notes information was given its own area and named “Release Notes”. RVM requirements information is now located under “Requirements” via the Dashboard view.
RVM supports precompiled binary installations on some operating systems and for specific ruby versions. It will attempt to install binary releases by default. Options were added to allow installing only binary releases or to disable attempts to install binary releases.
RVM attempts to verify checksums for downloads when available. Some downloads don’t have checksums available for various reasons. For added security, RVM will halt installation if checksums cannot be verified. Options have been added to JewelryBox to allow different levels and temporary overrides of checksum security.
You can now upgrade ruby versions from the manage rubies interface. NOTE: The target ruby for the upgrade must already be installed. The upgrade will migrate everything to the target ruby and remove the old ruby.
Gemsets are now cleanable from the “Disk Usage” area.
Binary links are now cleanable from the “Disk Usage” area.
Compile flags entered in the text field on the ruby installation options view were not being passed to the ruby installation method. This is now fixed. “export” is NOT prefixed.
When gcc was not detected, i.e. “command not found”, an index out of bounds error was thrown causing an application crash. This has been fixed.
A logic error for detecting log file paths in the output caused a crash. Not every occurrence of “Please read” is followed by a log path. The logic failed when it says things like “Please read ‘rvm mount’ …” This should now be fixed.
View indexes weren’t updated. Oops.
This was caused by one or both of the log parser logic error or unexpected output by verify downloads issues.
Graph drawing calculations were incorrect resulting in incorrect usage representations in the meter graphic.
Graph coloring was not being applied to the correct keys.
“Environment” was spelled incorrectly.
Improved interface interaction while removing rubies.
cURL output was extremely verbose while downloading archives. JewelryBox now quiets CURL output to make it easier to read installation output.
RVM now uses dots to indicate progress during the ruby installation process. JewelryBox now turns down the dot frequency to make it easier to read installation output.