There are very few people in the software development community who haven't even heard of Ruby and rails yet. Ruby is a new programming language and rails is a framework to create MVC applications. The Ruby and Rails combination is believed to make the web application development fairly easy. Some call it better perl http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 and others believe it will take over the web application development world. Time will tell the future of Ruby but for now I have decided to check it out.

Is it just me or others in IT are also getting "job available" emails everyday? I get average 3 emails every day about some job available somewhere. Most of them are the kinds of jobs that we think are going to India. Is off shoring slowing down? Or is the market so hot that even with increasing off shoring there are jobs opening up everywhere? This reminds me of some recruiting experiences I had when I was looking to change jobs.

Software Development Magazine has a nice article on becoming an independent IT consultant. I think every aspiring independent consultant should read this article before jumping into this field. The article does a fantastic job of explaining the qualities you need as an independent consultant, traits of those who have been successful in this field, various costs involved in working as an independent and some things to watch out for.

Let's start with the basics. Functional organizations are divided in functional groups e.g. finance, IT, HR etc. Within these groups, people are divided in teams. If you are lucky, you belong to only one team and have only one manager! Managers of these teams are called functional managers in project management terminology. They are responsible for resource assignment, performance evaluations etc. In short, they keep the organizational engine well oiled and running.

After disappearing for about 2 months, I am back! What happened? Nothing special. Spent some time with in laws, took care of some longer term family projects that needed dedicated attention in the evenings and focused a lot on a project I am managing these days.

Do you work for a group or organization where everything is standardized? Do you always work with fixed set of tools and utilities? Do you always have a template for every kind of documentation you write? Or are you part of a team with "Get the work done I don't care how" mentality? What should be the approach of a group? Should the developers be allowed to pick and choose the tools they use?