Fight the guy you can’t see
I recently purchased the new UFC game for PS3, which is only single player locally, 2 player online. I have been having friends over and shit talking while kicking their ass in a fighting game since I was a kid, Karate Champ allowed 2 people to fight locally in 1984. We all grew up playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat in the late 80′s and early 90′s. How the hell is it that it can be 2009 and we are making leaps and bounds in the technology for these systems, but removing fundamental concepts that got people into video games in the first place.

Technology
We have wireless controllers, wireless internet, live updates of firmware, updates for gameplay. Game consoles with more processing power then some computers, projects have even been created to cluster them into super computers. Video games are output in higher quality then most television channels and even some movies. Cut-scenes have become almost cinema quality. Real time lighting and shading, and physics engines that make almost any action realistic.

Split-Screen
These days most people who can afford the expense of 7th Generation game consoles have large tv’s 50″-73″ some even bigger. We have been playing split-screen games when the biggest TV any of my friends and I had was 19″ and now that we finally have TV’s big enough that it does not matter if we split the screen we no longer have the ability to do so.

Massively Multiplayer
You can play 16 guys across the world multi-player but not the guy next to you, Some MMO’s are capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users. You have voice chat, and buddy-lists to accomodate you interacting with friends, but there is nothing for you and your friends if you want to hang out in the same house and have a few beers.

I am just finding it hard to believe that with all this technology, and the size of our TV’s that game producers are ignoring a fundamental feature of video games. This is why many of us started playing video games in the first place. Video games are no longer something I can do with my friends when they come over, unless everyone is up for a game of Little Big Planet. There are very few games you can enjoy with your friends.

Anti-Social or Money Hungry?
Has society become this anti-social that the only important part of games is to focus on single person interaction. We don’t want to encourage people to invite their friends over for a friendly ass kicking in the newest fighting game, or racing game? or is it just that the corporations that develop these games are so hungry for money that they put people in a position to buy more consoles and more games so they can set them up in multiple rooms in order to get somewhere close to the same interaction they had as kids?

Whatever the reason, I hope this is a short phase that will soon be over. I wont be playing many new video games until I am able to look my friend in the face while I tell him he is a shitty driver, or that i’m going to school him in the newest boxing game or whatever it may be.

/rant

While rails does provide bundling of CSS and Javascript it does not support minification. Which in my opinion is a huge win for site performance, and a less needed feature for this particular project; but a nice to have is the concept of bundles. Specific sets of pages may need the same 3 Javascript files etc. So it would be nice to just keep track of these common bundles and include them as necessary in my layouts and views.

Enter asset_packager. asset_packager is a project created by Scott Becker. Which does exactly what I was looking for. You configure your bundles and the order in which files are placed in the bundle through an easy to configure yml file. And you just run a rake task when deploying to create the bundles. I won’t go into detail here about how to use it; but feel free to follow the link to the project page here http://synthesis.sbecker.net/pages/asset_packager

One thing that I did notice while looking into this project was that it uses JSMIN ported to ruby. I am personally a fan of YUI Compressor so I opted to go with a fork of asset_packager by Erik Andrejko found here http://github.com/eandrejko/asset_packager/tree/master which uses YUI Compressor for its minification process.

On to the good stuff.

As happy as I was with what I had found, it seemed to still have some inherent problems.

1. When bundling CSS if you are using relative paths, when they get bundled into a file in your base directory your paths will no longer work, so you need to manually modify your CSS files to have absolute paths to your images. Which can often be part of plugin or library that you are making use of like jQuery UI.
2. If you have implemented far forward expiration dates like you should on your media (my next post will talk about this), your CSS files do not have a cache buster to ensure that when your media is updated the cache is expired
3. Rails has the concept of an asset_host, it creates a key based on your asset name which will always map to the same domain, and spread the media across asset_hosts by supplying a configuration option in your environment file to help overcome the limit of connections per domain. Well if you design sites the way I do, I have very minimal links to media inside my markup, its all contained in the CSS, so I make very little use of the image_tag helper and therefore little use of the rotating asset_hosts

I have created a fork of Erik Andrejko’s repository for asset_packager and implemented solutions for all of the problems I found above.

During the bundling process it will now determine absolute paths of your assets and use those in the bundled file only. Leaving your originals untouched.

Paths to images are now appended with a cache buster using the same approach as rails, determining the last modified date and appending a timestamp to the url. Now when running your rake task for bundling you can rest assured that new versions of your media will be seen if you have set far forward expiration dates.

If the environment you are running the rake task against has an asset_host set for rails to use asset_packager will pick up on it the same way rails does replacing %d with 0-3, the same asset will always get the same hostname to ensure caching works properly.

While my fork with these changes is of Erik Andrejko’s repository none of the changes are specific to this fork. They can easily be added to Scott Becker’s original implementation. The only changes were the addition of a single method, and calls to it from within the bundle method, as well as a change to the rakefile to include the environment so that the method would have access to the rails configuration.

my github repo can be found here: http://github.com/erikstmartin/asset_packager/tree

I’m open to any comments or questions you may have. Let me know if you find any problems or if you just want to tell me how useful you have found the changes.

update: Erik Andrejko is quick! It appears my changes have already been merged into his branch

when running script/generate rspec new rake tasks are placed in lib/tasks/rspec.rake

if you open this file you will see that line 101 is the offending line

::STATS_DIRECTORIES < < %w(Routing\ specs spec/lib) if File.exist?('spec/routing')

should be

::STATS_DIRECTORIES < < %w(Routing\ specs spec/routing) if File.exist?('spec/routing')

I sent a message to David Chelimsky so this issue should be resolved in the next release.

I was sitting at home  and I received this email. (shortened to just useful excerpts)

Hello Erik,
Trust you are doing well. I just left you a Voice Mail.

Please let me know if you are interested in the position bellow by sending me your resume. I will call you to further discuss..

Web Developer III
Location: Orlando, FL
Job Type: Contract
Duration: 9 months
Rate: Open

.. long position summary ..
.. requirements ..
Significant experience with Content Management Systems
3-4 years of hands-on web development, including XML, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript
3 years experience with ASP/JSP/PHP or other server-side scripting language
Experience with Flash and ActionScript a strong plus
Experience with two and three tier web architecture.

Reading this I’m thinking wow, this sounds an awful lot like a position where I work, Web Developer III my work ranks our development positions I, II, III most places use Jr., Sr. etc. Ok, location Orlando, even closer. 9 month contract. Ok now this is getting eerie. Any contract position I have ever been offered is 6 or 12 months, occasionally i’ll get offered a 3 month, but 9 months is a Disney thing.

So on to the requirements, significant experience with CMS we heavily use cms’s ASP/JSP/PHP or other server-side scripting language at this point it has to be Disney, how many companies don’t care what language you have experience in? Disney has its own internally developed language so we hire from all backgrounds, but I’d guess the overwhelming majority of companies hire straight from the large pool of people that use the technology they implement.

But surely he couldn’t have emailed me an offer for a job at my current employer, after all he found me through my resume that is on monster.com (which I’d also like to mention hasn’t been updated in at least 6-9 months). I mean its the first entry in my previous experience section. Ok the suspense is killing me, lets just ask.

Dear Recruiter,

Is this position with Disney Internet Group / Disney Interactive Media Group / Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online ? Based off the contract term, the position title, skill set they are seeking, and overall job description it sounds just like it?

it did not take long to receive a reply, maybe 15 minutes.

Erik,

Thanks for your response. Yes the position is with one of the Disney groups. Would you be interested? feel free to send in your resume and I can call you back to further discuss the position with you. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. My details are listed below.

Thanks

Recruiter

This is the point where I yell some profanity, along the lines of you have to be f*in kidding me! I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Why on earth would you not read someones resume before contacting them about a position. I’m fired up now. and as usual for me I’m pretty blunt I feel something needs to be said. So this is my reply.

I can’t tell you how much this response disappointments me. The sad truth is that this isn’t the first situation like this that has happened to me either, and is almost a daily occurrence at the office. I believe that I speak for quite a number of professionals when I ask that you please read our resume’s before contacting us regarding positions.

You are contacting me about a position that I already work in, I have been working for Disney since January of 2007, and have been a full time employee of theirs since April of 2008  and still presently working there, had anyone looked at the first entry in the employment experience section of my resume they would have noticed that.

Again, please read our resumes before contacting us about positions that we already hold, or that have nothing to do with our knowledge and previous work experience, because our resume happens to contain some sort of keyword out of the job description.

Sincerely,
Erik St. Martin

I know this probably won’t help he is probably on to his next victim, but it made me feel a little better.

The content is stored in text files, one per page, which means that no matter how many pages there are, page load time remains virtually the same, unlike a CMS with content stored in a database that takes longer and longer to query as more content is added.

I was shocked, they cannot be serious right? It seems as if in their opinion databases have been a waste of researchers time. I don’t know where to begin at dismissing this, I pose these questions?

• If flat files are so much better and faster why does the majority of software use databases, and why were databases invented?
• What do databases use to store their information? You guessed it files! except a huge amount of effort has been placed in making sure that I/O is optimized, as well as caching in memory things that are commonly accessed.

On to my question about your architecture, that no matter how many files its virtually the same load time! How much do you know about file I/O? If you have say 1,000 articles that have been placed on the disk through the course of 5 or 6 years I dare say these are going to be spread out across the disk, now your site that has 1,000 articles should have multiple users at the same time on, maybe in the hundreds? What do you suppose happens? There is going to be overhead while the disk seeks to all these different positions, maybe you’ll be in luck and the memory wont be reused by another process and the file will still be there for the second request.

On to scaling, when all this I/O and even just load becomes to much for one server, what is to be done? clustering should be fun, you will need to move these files to some sort of NAS device, and manage them from there.

/rant

It’s not that I don’t see this small lightweight cms as being useful, there are plenty of people out there that this is extremely useful for, but don’t play up your software by playing down proven technology. When using statements like this as benefits to your software you may want to do some research to see how accurate you are.

The other night while i was using metric_fu against one of my projects it kept complaining about my codebase not being a valid working directory, so I went ahead and implemented git support, yesterday Jake released the newest version 0.8.0 which contains my patch. So git lovers go update! (http://github.com/jscruggs/metric_fu/tree/master)

Next on my list removing the Rails dependency for dates.

1) Use XDoc comments wherever applicable. There are a number of tools out there that will make your life a lot easier when generating base documentation and HTML versions of your API documentation. They are quite useful.

2) Don’t comment just to comment. Quantity is not better than quality in most situations and this one is no exception. To many comments can be distracting and take you away from what is important; The code.

3) Answer the write question. To many times I read comments that always answer the question “What?” . If you can not easily read your code and determine what its doing you may want to consider addressing the problem a different way. There are a few exceptions to this rule with complex algorithms and methods, but you should use comments that answer this question minimally. The real question that should be answered is “Why?”. 6 months or 2 years down the road when you open up the code its probably going to be fairly obvious what the code is doing, what will not be so obvious is why you did something that particular way, some business based rule that was determined in a meeting that made sense at the time, is now just a big question mark. You will thank yourself when you don’t have to rewrite something just to figure out there was a reason you had done it that way.

4) Use examples. Even the best documentation and comments can leave confusion to people not as familiar with the code as you are. Be sure to include small snippets of code demonstrating how to use a class or method that you have created if there may be room for confusion.

5) Don’t be afraid of humor. Hunting down defects or just implementing a new feature can be long and tedious at times. At 3am when you or a fellow developer are knee deep in code you’ll appreciate the laugh it will remind you how much fun coding is.

Ninety percent of these articles compare Linux to Windows in order to be “ready”. Well the day Linux is like Windows is the day I find something else. Linux should keep its independence. The differences it has in comparison to Windows is part of what makes it so great, and the reason I use it as my primary Operating System. Windows is not for everyone, neither is Mac, Unix, Linux, or any other operating system for that matter. The freedom of choice is the best part about these different products. Making multiple clones of Windows with different names will just complicate things.

Linux continues to accel and innovate. Many of the complications people feel that Linux has are in the hands of third party vendors. Hardware vendors not releasing Linux native drivers, or the documentation so that Linux developers can add more support for new hardware, as well as software vendors still ignoring the Linux market. On the software front this should become less of an issue as more web services are launched to provide the services we are currently using desktop applications for. This is one of the main reasons that would keep people from migrating, that along with companies current setups and dependencies on Windows. Before any migration can take place people need the willingness to change, no one wants to feel like they have to learn how to use an Operating System again. We still have a significantly large computer user-base that are just not knowledgeable with computing at all.

Let each Operating System serve its purpose, and stop comparing them to Windows as the basis of whether or not they are “ready”. Windows comes with its complications too. To each their own. Accept the differences each has, and focus on how each can improve. I’m not looking forward to 50 million clones of Windows. If thats what I wanted I’d use Windows. Let’s instead turn our focus to interoperability between these different operating systems, standards, etc. This is where we need help the most.

Is It Really A Good Opportunity?

When looking at any job offer through a recruiting firm the first and foremost thing to remember is that recruiters are sales people. Despite what any recruiter says, they are not out for your best interest. They are out to get paid and make their commission off of your placement. The rate they offer you is determined by them for maximum profit on their end, not what they feel is fair.

The person contacting you has probably merely scanned your resume looking for buzzwords and thats if your lucky. They have not paid a bit of attention to any detail inside your resume so don’t take their word about how great an opportunity is. See my previous post Trapped in Recruiter Hell for a good example of this.

Be sure to ask a lot of questions about the position. I have dealt with many recruiters who knew less about the position they were trying to fill than they knew about me. If you’re uncomfortable about any aspect of it walk away. Don’t get yourself into a bad position its not worth it.

Moving across the country for a 3 month contract with possibility for a permanent position is not a good opportunity, not for anyone. Unless maybe they are offering you a substantial amount of money and relocation help, just don’t go and sell your house. I’ll come back to this later.

Negotiate! Negotiate! Negotiate!

It still astonishes me how frequently I talk to leased workers who came in at an extremely low rate simply because thats what they were offered. A useful piece of advice is never take what they are offering, recruiters will always low ball you. Keep in mind the recruiting firm is making a lot of money off of you, the rate at which the employer pays them is far higher then what they are offering you. Tap into their profits a bit, get yourself a good rate.

Most recruiters will not give you benefits unless you ask them for them. Be sure to ask if they’re offered. If they do not, insist they furnish you with a couple more dollars an hour to account for them. I have yet to have a recruiter decline this request. My most recent encounter I ended up receiving both the benefits and the higher rate.

Payment Terms

Save yourself the hassle don’t fall in to the 1099 trap. Many recruiters will try to get you into companies under a 1099 Independent Contractor agreement. This opens up a whole can of worms you don’t want to deal with. Be prepared to pay around 15% more in taxes because your paying all the employment taxes yourself. You will want to store money throughout the year or make quarterly payments so your not in for a huge shock at the end of the year.

Try your best to work under W-2 as a standard employee so the recruiter is covering a portion of the taxes. If you cannot work under a W-2, do yourself a favor spend the $400 and form an S-Corporation. This way you can pay yourself a portion of your pay as a salary and the rest as dividends. This will save you from paying employment tax on all of your income. It will also put you in a position to be more aggressive with your deductions. I have met several contractors who will only do Corp-to-Corp billing.

Expect To Be Extended

Don’t count on being converted after your 3, 6, or 9 month contract is complete. Despite what percentage of people your recruiter tells you get converted. The facts are not in your favor. Most companies rarely hire on after the first contract especially if it’s a contract as short as 3 months. They more often then not will extend you out for a longer period of time. Be prepared. Keep in mind, a lot of employers who use leased workers have several at a time, you are competing for the same permanent positions as all the other contractors, the ones before you, and even ones after you if they are exceptional workers.

Contractors are often hired because more staff is needed to get a project / company off the ground, and far less to maintain it or continue running the project after its been launched. So as sad as it may be you have to come to the realization that not all contractors will be converted. Which brings me to the next point.

Mitigate Risk

Recruiters lie, they embellish. They try to make your opportunities with the company out to be more then they really are. I’d say 75% of contract workers are only working under contract for the chance to take the permanent position. A recruiter will not tell you your chances are slim. So you need to mitigate the risk of being left unemployed.

Make sure you save money, don’t take all that money you’re making and throw it away on new gadgets and toys. Contract positions come and go, they are risky thats why you make more then a salaried employee.

Don’t sell your house and move out of state, or across the state. You don’t want to be left in a position in 6 months where you don’t get that permanent position you were counting on, and now you need to find a new job, and find a new home. The converse of this is also true. Don’t up and by a house near your contract position to have the chance that in 6-9 months you will need to find your next contract position and close a lot of doors for yourself because you are unable to sell your house.

Do not wait until the last minute to look for something else, give yourself at least a month, preferably 1 1/2 to 2 months to find a new job. If it gets this close to the end of your contract without any traction being made to convert you or extend your contract its not worth the risk. It is their fault for not keeping up on it. Always keep your options open.

Prevent Resume Rot

Resume Rot is a horrible thing. You end up in a contract position using all these out dated skill sets and before you know it the industry has changed, and your left back out in the job market hunting. Keep yourself up to date on current industry standards and technologies. This will keep you in a good position if things don’t work out where your at.

Follow Up

Be sure to follow up regurally with your recruiter about the status of your contract. Don’t count on them to contact you. It’s unreliable. Make sure you jump on their case to find out about an extension with plenty of notice in advance. They may drop the ball.

I have been working for Disney Internet Group as a leased worker since January of 2007. This has been a great experience for me and has introduced me into the world of a relaxed work environment. The people I work with are fantastic, and the work is very rewarding. We all work hard and play harder. Everyone here is extremely intelligent as well as quite amusing.

I couldn’t begin to sit back and reflect on all the great moments here, the inside jokes that seem to persist for months at a time. The Nerf gun raids on other teams. Turning our entire floor into a miniature golf course, with teams creating their own themed holes.

My current role is as a Web Developer on the Walt Disney World booking engine. Which is the 800lb gorilla here at the office. It has been very rewarding to watch the site grow and see my ideas come to life on such a large scale. Being presented with problems, or ideas and being given the opportunity to run with it. To use my own creativity to solve the problem. Disney places a lot of faith in their developers and that we have a say in what is released into our site. There have been numerous times I have pushed back on features or changes that I didn’t feel were in the best interest of the site, and they were withdrawn. It really gives us a sense of pride and ownership of our product.

One of the greatest experiences to me is still hanging out at the parks with other developers having drinks and socializing with guests in the park. It’s really rewarding to talk to people who have booked on your site, and are having a fantastic time on their vacation. There is a bit of amusement on our part sitting back and thinking, these people don’t even realize that they’re having a conversation with several of the people who built the site they used to book their vacation.

I have shared many laughs and many late nights with other developers here and love every minute of it. This is a great opportunity for me and I look forward to my time to come with the company.