Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

Hello my dear readers, and many apologies for my serious blog neglect as of late. Some may already know this, but back at the end of June, I decided to make a change. I left my position at Gazelle to pursue an opportunity at a little startup called Punchbowl. Leaving Gazelle was hard to do - but it was the right time for me and I wish them the absolute best. I was actually a customer of Punchbowl before I became an employee, and that's been a fun perspective and an interesting transition for me. I've really enjoyed getting back into a true startup environment, and my new 20 minute commute (as opposed to an hour!) is doing wonders for my psyche.

With the holiday season upon us, you may be interested to know what Punchbowl does. The site offers a comprehensive party planning tool - from getting your friends to help decide on a date, to sending invites and allowing them to choose items from the potluck list. We also recently released our brand-spankin-new free ecards: Digital Greeting Cards with the look and feel of paper cards. There's even a special section for business christmas cards for all you classy professionals. It's all the rage, kids, so go send some good cheer, plan that holiday gathering, and party on!

Hmm I wrote this article ages ago, but apparently never posted it (insert apologies for neglecting my blog here). Here's another tasty morsel from my Intellectual Property class:

Non-Compete Clauses

Often when you work as a contractor, or even sometimes as a full-time employee, companies include non-compete clauses or agreements in the paperwork you have to sign. A Non-Compete basically says, "if you leave this company you cannot go to work for one of our competitors." But did you know that it's extremely difficult to enforce a Non-Compete? Courts don't like to enforce them because they put people out of work, thus taking away their livelihood. In order to successfully enforce a Non-Compete, Company A must be able to prove that the employee is giving Company B, their competitor, Company A's trade secrets. Just the desire to avoid competition is not enough to put your ex-employees out of work.

P.S. Just like before, please note that this information applies to United States law. Would love to hear how this works in other parts of the world!

It's official, I'll be attending RailsConf this year in Baltimore! I didn't get to go last year since I was out of the country, so I'm looking forward to getting back in touch this year. (And being a student certainly pays off... the student discount was a very pleasant surprise!) I also plan on checking out the Ignite RailsConf event which looks like an interesting addition to the program this year. Hope to see you there! :)

Recently we had a guest speaker come in to my marketing class to talk about qualitative research interviews. She had some great advice for interviewing customers and getting valuable information out of them. Here are some tips I learned for conducting customer interviews:

Be Prepared, Yet Flexible. Always have a list of questions, but use them as a guide. Let the content of the interview go where the customer takes it.
Show You Care. It should be obvious to your customer that you care about what he or she has to say. Pay attention! If you don't care, why bother?
Don't Interrupt. Never interrupt your customer while they are telling you a story. Instead, make a note of what you wanted to ask about and ask it when the story is done.
Pause. When the customer is done telling you a story, pause for slightly longer than you normally would, just to be sure they don't have anything else to add.
Be Encouraging. Non-verbal communication (i.e. head-nods) and minor vocalizations (i.e. "Mmhmm") show that you are still paying attention and encourage the customer to keep talking. Also, don't be afraid to probe the customer for more information with short extending questions like "Can you offer additional details?" or "What happened next?"
Don't Talk About Yourself. Customer interviews are NOT a two-way conversation - let the customer do the talking. You won't get accurate information by offering up your own insights and opinions.

I used to think that these techniques could only be used for market research at large companies who are developing new physical products, but after this particular class I started to think about how qualitative research applies to software development. Every one of these tips should be applied to our relationships with customers - especially in our initial meetings.

As developers, we often get ahead of ourselves and start planning out a product before we fully understand what our customers want. In my opinion, the first meeting with a customer should be exactly like a qualitative research interview. Allow the customer to talk at length about what they need and what kinds of problems they are trying to solve with the software. Show them you care about what they have to say and hold off on offering up your personal opinions. By structuring our initial meetings this way, we can get a clear, unbiased picture of the situation and create better solutions for our customers.

Lindsay Ucci

Ruby/Rails developer and wannabe pastry chef. :)

Welcome to ooochie.com! I'm Lindsay Ucci, and I'm a web developer in Boston, MA. If you're in the area, please get in touch!

Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

Party On

Things I Learned in Grad School #3

Non-Compete Clauses

See you at RailsConf!

Things I Learned in Grad School #2

Lindsay Ucci

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