Tag Archives: ruby az

Jul 19 2012

My Intern is all grown up


Yesterday was Ricks last day working with us…for now.  This spring I met Rick (@rickcarlino) at our local Ruby::AZ group.  He just started showing up to the meetings and we got to talking at the after meeting drinking hole.  Rick was ex-military and was excited to learn about Rails.  He had been learning Ruby on his own and was interested in web development.  Well, I decided to bring him on as an intern for RebeHold.  It was a great idea.

Rick was almost always the first person to get to HeatSyncLabs, a local hackerspace that we work out of, and usually one of the last to leave.  For about a month or so, Rick was there EVERY day.  The guy is like a sponge when it comes to learning new things.  He did so well that we soon started to pay him, albeit not a lot.  Rick continued to excel and was soon racking up more points getting stories done than the rest of us were.

RebelHold went thru its transition that I have written about before and I put Rick full time on the project that I was managing under Rebel Outpost.  I gave hime a raise; for one week.  The next week I tried out a sliding pay scale based on the user stories completed.  That week I paid Rick our full pay for apprentices.  Not mentioning numbers here but it was like a 280% pay raise.  Rick worked even harder.

Rick has an amazing desire to learn and it amazes me how much he retains.  In college for Korean and Business Management, he still wants to learn Mobile Apps, alternative programming languages, and anything to do with a computer!

Well, he is off to Korea for a semester and we will miss him dearly.  It was great to watch him go from unpaid intern to what he has become, a full fledged developer.  The good news to all of this is, he will one day come back, as long as he doesn’t defect to North Korea, and when he comes back we will have a place for him here.

Be safe Ricky!

Mar 29 2012

Ruby and Rails 101 Course


For quite some time I have wanted to put together a Ruby and Rails 101 course for the community at no charge for attendees.  I recently posted a message on the Ruby::AZ google group to see what interest was there.  Although it seems that there is a greater need for intermediate classes, I still believe that we should start at the beginner level and if that is successful then we can have a more advanced course.

The plan is to have a weekly class most located in Phoenix/Tempe area.  I feel that once a month class is too much time in between.  Once we have the course planned, we will know how many weeks we are looking at.  I want the classes to be hands-on and last 1 – 2 hours.

So, as it stands it looks like RebelHold and our friends at Flatterline along with the Ruby::AZ group are going to make this happen.  I have had several people volunteer to help out and that is yet another example of how great the Ruby community is!

Why are we doing this?  If you have read my blog before, it is obvious that I do not like seeing people getting charged to learn programming.  Charging a company to do training is one thing but we as the Ruby community owe it to ourselves and others to help develop new Ruby programmers.  At RebelHold, we bring in apprentices and train them.  After they have made the transition, they are made partners.  So by offering this course, we are developing programmers that might work with us some day.  I owe a lot to many people that took the time to teach me Ruby and to help me learn.  Time to return the favor.

If you are interested in attending or would like to help out with the classes, please email me or go to the Ruby::AZ google group and post a message.