Ruby on Rails Outsourcing

When I was still in school I read one of Kiyosaki’s most popular books, Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Immediately I do not like the book because it persuades people to NOT work hard, but to get ‘Passive Income’.

But still I was influenced, not only by the book, but also by my friends who believe in the book; “You must become an investor, and let your business become a money generating machine without you actually work too much.”

As my Ruby on Rails outsourcing business grows,  so too the time needed for me for management. I was beginning to work at least 11 hours a day (starting from around 4 am), from Monday to Saturday. Most of my day is spent on managing people.

I am the boss, why should I work at all? Why not I hire professionals and let them do the work for me?

The answer is simple. Because I like my business, and just like many other entrepreneurs, I am an entrepreneur who actually LOVES working. And I’ve learned to enjoy managing people. And I’ve learned that it is FINE to do all the low level work. I’m still a small entrepreneur anyway. Be hardworking, dont follow Kiyosaki!

I’ve been depending upon an HTMLer to do the our HTML work.

Although he is good, it becomes apparent that we’re being too dependent, and the business just cant scale that way.

I believe everyone at Kiranatama should be empowered. I believe every engineers should be able to write Rails, write unit tests, do QA, deployment, caching, and also write HTML and CSS.

And so Kiranatama decides to train every engineers on HTML and CSS. Materials will come from Bulletproof Web Design.

This way, business can scale, and the skillset of our engineers improve.

If you have a Rails application that needs to include models from another Rails application, oftentimes you will want to add features to those methods, but you cannot since you cannot touch the other Rails app’s codebase.

If this is the case, you can use class_eval, which Neeraj explains nicely.

For example, if you want to add an after_save to a class Example :

Example.class_eval do
after_save :somemethod

def somemethod
end
end

Note that you dont wanna put that code under vendor/plugins/ . Instead, put it under a place where it’s executed everytime.

I’m too busy. My biggest client has taken too much time out of me, and thus I have less and less time and energy to expand this RoR outsourcing business.

I used to do all the stuffs, from recruiting, training, project-managing, to refactoring code.

See, the problem is that there are several potential clients wanting engineers. We can give them engineers but without enough training, project-managing, and refactoring (QA), I’m just so worried we cant give the quality and productivity we strive for.

We are polishing our company everyday. We built our ‘How-to-Manage-for-Productivity’ doc, proper training procedure, and Ruby on Rails best practices and quality standard document. And, I’ve distributed the roles of training, QAing, etc to people in my company, and thus I’m hoping we can accept new clients in a faster rate!