Links

"When I first landed in Portland — way back in November — one of the first events I went to was Startup Weekend. One of the first people I met was Cloudability CEO Mat Ellis.

He immediately turned and introduced me to Colby Aley, one of his engineers, and told me that Aley is among the best developers in town."

Having worked on some large legacy apps, breaking things out into microservices is looking more and more attractive these days. But how, and where to start? This article takes a look at how you might answer these questions and why, using Barrister RPC.

I ran into this exact issue in a project recently and had no idea there was a way to use scopes from joined models like this.

ActiveAdmin is insanely useful, but sometimes you need to do something a little out of the box, and that's when it gets more difficult. That's when a post like this is a lifesaver.

Javascript Weekly's Newsletter for this week features David Aragon's talk at jQuery Conf. He talks about scope and learning how to utilize This in Javascript.

I found it really helpful, plus it features plenty of Game of Thrones references (no spoilers!).

Our friend, Megan, over at Cloud Four opens up on what being agile means to their process.

We were briefly mentioned in an article about hiring Jr. developers from a local code school.

I just ran into an issue with a branch that had a tag with the same name as the branch and it was causing strange issues with branching off of that, so this was very helpful.

It's no mystery that client side JS frameworks are here to stay, and while they do offer many benefits. The drawbacks can be daunting, especially if you have an application with any traction already.

Here Airbnb developer Spike Brehm (@spikebrehm) lays out what he sees as the future, the Isomorphic Javascript MVC...

Oh and while we are at it. Welcome to Portland @Airbnb!

Tuesday night I attended the second ever PDX Digital PM meetup session at Instrument. It was beyond refreshing to meet with other project managers / producers and hear that others are facing similar operational challenges that candidly, we deal with daily at Planet Argon. During the meetup we broke into small groups and discussed various topics such as preferred tools, process, and client expectations.

The small group format provided us with the opportunity to share our experiences and work with each other through some issues that we face. Garnering such rich information from peers in the industry is beyond valuable, especially for someone who works with a small team.

One of the most valuable pieces of information that I carried away with me last night concerns a scheduling tool called 'Merlin'. Listening to the Instrument’s producers rave about this tool while at the same time voice concerns about other tools I myself have tried and immediately discarded in the past, I knew I had to try it. So far, I might just be sold on it.

Special thanks goes to Adam Edgerton, of Metal Toad Media, who took the time to organize these meetups. Prior to this, I was unable to find anything quite like this in Portland. Last night’s turnout clearly indicates that this is a much desired gathering of the minds. I'm greatly looking forward to the next one on April 8th!