I joined Miso’s engineering team last month after ten years of running my own companies and freelancing as a software developer. Several people asked me if I was worried about making the transition from “being the boss” to “having a boss.” Coming from people who know me, but who don’t know Miso, I could understand their concern. But after I met this team and got an insider’s view of some of the projects they’re (rather, we’re!) working on, any anxiety I may have had was replaced by pure excitement. I am thrilled to be a part of this very talented team and I can’t wait to see our amazing projects take flight.

Joining Miso also means that I have the opportunity to re-immerse myself in the ruby community after spending the past 18 months on a java gig. One of the chief complaints I had with ruby (and rails) was the difficulty in running multiple versions on the same machine and maintaining a sane set of gems for each rails project. While I was “gone” the ruby community solved this problem. Twice. Using your choice of RVM or rbenv plus Bundler, you can run any number of different Ruby versions mixed and matched with any number of gemsets. (I just discovered that RVM now even has a Mac GUI.) One gotcha with RVM that bit me: sudo is no longer your friend when it comes to installing gems. In fact,

sudo gem install xyz

will totally subvert RVM’s clean bucketing of your gems into gemsets, so I needed to quickly break the habit of using sudo to let RVM work its magic….

Manging rubies with RVM or rbenv and dependencies with bundler is just the tip of the iceberg. The more I dig back into ruby, the more progress I’m finding the community has made in tools to support test-driven development, mock/factory objects, Rails alternatives (buona sera, Padrino!) . . . the list goes on and on.

By joining Miso, I got to meet a whole bunch of new friends. By diving back into ruby, I reconnected with an old friend and found out that he had gotten in shape, bought a whole new wardrobe and learned kung fu.