This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Nathaniel Talbott: Open Classes, Open Companies Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Live from RubyConf 2006

The conference opened this morning with another thought-provoking talk, Open Classes, Open Companies, by Nathaniel Talbott, author of Test::Unit and perennial RubyConf favorite. He discussed his views on business, based on the way that he runs Terralien, his Ruby on Rails contracting firm. I opened up my computer and starting taking notes towards the second half of the talk...

On applying Ruby's openness to his business: His contractors are able to see each other's statements of work via Basecamp. The first time that he had two contractors, he realized that they would be able to see each other's rates. He initially worried, but then realized that if he was unable to justify the disparity in rates, then there shouldn't be a disparity, even if it was just a matter of "You need to work on your negotiating skills."

Rich Kilmer asks if the analogy can only be taken so far, since "the real world has bad people". Nathaniel answers, "What's the worst-case scenario? The worst thing that can happen is that I get nothing from the time I invest except what I learned from it." Lesson:, limit the impact of any particular business agreement so the worst-case scenario is an acceptable risk.

He only does time and materials. "RFPs make me gag." People spend all this time on a piece of paper and put more confidence in that paper than what your opinion is.

Delivering once-a-week is a good way to showing the client value for his time and materials. Don't get stuck into long-term agreements with clients.

Someone asks about scaling these principles to larger organizations, do the same things apply when you get to 7000 people and "do no evil" doesn't quite work the same way. Nathaniel remarks that the question plays into the evergreen Ruby question: "Does it scale?" Personally (Obie), I think about how many less lines of code I need for Ruby applications than more traditional technologies. The more appropriate question is "Do you really want to scale a company beyond a small size?"

Audience member remarks, "You're not big enough right now to have contracts that you get sued on. Two-page contracts are just a recap of the meeting of the minds that led to the agreement." No disagreement.

In response to a John Lam question about providing growth opportunities for his contractors: Nathaniel's states his goal of getting his sub-contractors about 30 hours a week, so that they have time to work on their own dreams and advance out of contracting that way.

I'm happy that these kinds of softer topics are included in an otherwise hardcore technical conference.