We are Family

For those of you who regularly read, or at least know me, know that I work/ed for a software development shop in Chicago called Obtiva. And if you knew that then you almost certainly know that Obtiva was recently acquired by Groupon.

Obtiva has a weekly get-together back at homebase called Geekfest. This is where everyone piles into one spot for some food and, more importantly, discussion about new technology, programming principals, or anything else that we’re interested in. Yesterday marked what may be the last Geekfest in its current iteration. I’m sure it will live on in a new home but that is a discussion for a different day. It seemed the perfect time to have a retrospective of Obtiva as a whole. Many things were said… some old, some fresh and new, some enlightening, and almost all humbling.

This is where my story begins…

Out of all the things that were said, to me, they all tied to a singularity. And that to me that was family. So I’d like to share with you what I shared with others yesterday.

Something I want to carry forward into our new adventures is the idea of family. Not necessarily my own little personal family where work/life balance comes into play but the family that is Obtiva. If you are from a large family like me then you already know that there are members you are close to, some that are more distant, and some that you may not care to interact with. At times everyone of us in that room can fit into one of those categories.

There are things that we share with each other that go beyond a work relationship. We share our triumphs and failures. We’ve laughed, been stressed, and have cried together. I know you guys have had my back for many moments during my time at Obtiva and you should know that I’ve got yours. I am comfortable saying that everyone in that room is my family.

I am scared that something like that could get lost in translation with a move to a larger company. I figure that you can only scale family so much before it becomes a community of strangers and that would be a HUGE loss.

This attribute of Obtiva has set the bar for me when looking at any other company, development related or not. If/when my time with Grouptiva comes to an end, this is THE quality that will be looked for and will make or break opportunities.

My name is Matt Polito and I have a hypenated last name of obtiva

We are obtiva… we are family.

Step Into My Breadbox, A Tale of Money Lost and Knowledge Gained

Before starting with Obtiva a bit ago, I started a toy project called Breadbox. It was a project started mostly out of necessity. At the time I was freelancing and didn’t want to pay a monthly rate for invoicing software, so I did what software devs do… I built it. The project evolved slightly as it started moving toward a platform that I could sell as a service myself. I thought I really had something going because at the time there wasn’t many players in that space besides Blinksale & Freshbooks. Unfortunatly, while I was plugging away at building my very own piece of software as a service history… some new players came around. There were many but the ones closes to my work were Ballpark & Curdbee.

Curdbee, I felt, was my biggest contendor as at the time they were closest in featureset and had the same idea of free/very low priced options. Although Ballpark frustrated the crap out of me. They had design to drool over and many features I had ‘invented’ in my head. I guess there probably isn’t a lot reinvention going on in the simple invoicing space but I thought they were good ideas and Ballpark was already on their way to implementation. This was frustrating but and I wanted to give up many times but kept plugging away.

Breadbox served my purposes well and I ate my own dogfood right up until today. I’ve realized that I just don’t have the time to put into the project anymore and would like to make sure you all know there is a decent project out there to dive into.

There are many reasons i’m writing to you today. The two main reasons are as follows.

I want Breadbox to have a good home. It has been been open-sourced for a while but I don’t really advertise that. I feel there is a good codebase of clean code and also many pitfalls, but I learned A LOT along the way. I’m hoping that some developer hunting for a project to work on might take a look and give Breadbox a little love

I want to share my experience with anyone that will listen. There are so many stories of success but hardly any of failure, or at the very least, failure to launch. Even though I did not attain my goal of launching a service to make some extra cash with, I gained a wealth of knowledge that as I look back was invaluable. So on the surface it may appear a failure, for me, it was a huge success. Devs in general, but mostly the more green developer, out there need to understand that there will be sooooo many projects that you start and throw away… and that’s OK. Throw them away and then start all over again. The nice thing about code is that you can always write it again with your newly gained experience.

Possible Solution to bundling ruby-debug19

In a previous article I posted a solution to ruby-debug19 not building when using rvm. Many people have found this helpful and I’d like to make it a little easier.

The solution I’ve found goes something like this

bundle config build.ruby-debug19 --with-ruby-include=<path to used ruby>

Now this should allow you to just run bundle install with no code puke but I don’t think I like it. I feel that doing this may be encroaching a bit on your team members development environment. In theory we should be using very similar development environments but in practice that doesn’t seem to be the case.

What do you think?

*** UPDATE 2 ***

You should probably just completely disregard this article for now, it must have been a fluke that it worked for me originally. I can no longer reproduce a successful result. Sorry for any misdirection.

*** UPDATE ***

This adds an entry to bundler config located in your $HOME directory. So if you’re using rvm, this may not be the greatest solution… depending on your environment. Still tell me what you think.

Tidly Bits of Knowledge, Shared by You

All right people, I’m going to share a little secret with you. Go ahead come a little closer so you can hear me, this is important. This may be somewhat of a shock to some of you but you’re smart. Yeah I said it, now deal with it. Oh, don’t give me the rolley eye. I know that you’re significant other along with your mother has been telling this to you for years. Go ahead and call them up now to thank them, they were right. (It’s ok, I can wait)

You back? Good.

To start off I’d like to reference a previous article from a while back. Don’t worry, I’m getting to the point. The beginning of this article may have seemed a little hand hold-ey… I’d like to think of it more like a virtual high five. That was all just to pump you up for this tidbit of information.

Like I was saying, you’re smart. If you’re like me you’re probably thinking that you’re not as smart as your peers or have as much to offer. This is not a bad thing… at least not for me. It’s what constantly drives me to become better. It turns out that you’ve already got the skills to offer your peers something.

I feel one of the best things you can do for yourself and your peers/community is to write down the tidbits of knowledge that are most likely trapped in your meat locker. This has been something that I try to keep up with and helps me CONSTANTLY. Also it’s an awesome tool for when you’re mind escapes for a shake break (SHAKE BREAK!). Just go ahead and search for that problem you’re having… Google and your past self probably got your back. Any blog you have will do just fine. I prefer Tumblr just due to me finding it easier to quickly get short form articles out there.

I’ve seen many benefits to this. You know what’s better than searching for a problem solution and finding that you’ve already wrote said solution? Your peers doing that same search and finding your solution. You just helped someone and that feels good. It’s even better when someone tells you they found your solution. Hey and sometimes there is a cherry on top… sometimes it’s someone that you look up to. Which brings us back to my rambling above about confidence.

There is something you know right now that the person doesn’t and quite possibly is having trouble with… RIGHT NOW.

• RIGHT NOW… you’re a smart dude/tte
• RIGHT NOW… someone is in need of knowledge
• RIGHT NOW… that person is next to you
• RIGHT NOW… that person is in another country
• RIGHT NOW… is harder than it looks
• RIGHT NOW… you have the solution

Whoops, how’d Van Halen get in here… I don’t apologize for that.

I do, however, apologize for my rambling thought process. Hopefully I will have motivated you in some way to get tidbits of YOUR knowledge out there. Remember this does not need to be anything long form. I found that as a turn off initially but found that quick problem/solution articles worked for me. As an example, one of my more popular articles is a solution for ruby-debug19/linecache19.