A Mixed Bag Update

Published 29 June 05 by Justin French, 4 comments

I’m sure plenty of you are wondering what I’ve been working on at TextDrive since I was hired full time in May. There’s lots of stuff I can’t talk about yet (yes, it’s all Rails!), but in the meantime, I did make a post to the TextDrive weblog which will be of interest to a lot of you. Go have a quick read, then come back here!

I received a lot of “man, we’re jealous” and “what’s it like to work for TextDrive” emails after that post, so…

Working with the TextDrive staff is by far the high point of my career. From a technical point of view, of course they’re great, everyone knows that.

But behind these scenes, I see “bosses” that really care about their team. I see people being empowered with great responsibility, given the opportunity to shine, and the power to find their own place in the mix. I see both evolutionary and revolutionary ideas and solutions pouring out of each staff member daily. I see opensource projects like Rails being supported generously, and positions created for smart people.

On my birthday, the staff decided not only to get me a present, but between them my entire Amazon wishlist (7 books, a couple of CDs and DVDs, etc) was cleaned out and sent my way.

During the family birthday dinner, I was asked how the “new job” was going. My reply was simple – “This is the job I was born to do, and these people are nothing short of inspirational.”. Obviously, they’re now as excited as I am.

The other good news is that whilst I’m working with Rails 24/7, I’ve learned a whole lot of tips and tricks that I’m eager to share with you all as time becomes available. We’ve “sponsored” a few patches to Rails that will hopefully make it in to the next release, and I’m thinking of putting together a couple of Rails presentations for local programming groups.

If you haven’t had a look at Rails yet, now really is the best time. The API is about to be “frozen” so that they can work on performance tuning and bug fixes in preparation for a 1.0 release (0.13 is due any day now I hear).

I can’t imagine building applications like Strongspace and TextPanel with any other language or framework right now, and I’m sure after a few days with Ruby and Rails, you’ll agree.