Podcast #34: Ron Evans of The Hybrid Group

May 31, 12 • In Featured, Interviews, Podcast

In this episode, Ron Evans of The Hybrid Group talks about being a part of a consultancy and the importance of reputation, balancing family and distributed work, and a wonderful project aimed at our youth to introduce them to coding at a young age and keep the Ruby community alive and thriving!

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Show Notes:

Twitter: @deadprogram
The Hybrid Group
Kanban Pad
The Kids Ruby Project
Clutch

00:51 – Introduction

Ron Evans of the Hybrid Group a software consultancy with a dispersed team

01:50 – Interview begins

02:05 – Ron’s background

Ring leader of The Hybrid Group: a development company based in L.A.
Has developers in 5 countries, 4 different time zones, speaking in 4 different languages

04:05 – Sustainable development

Works on client programs already in progress
Takes over an existing code base

04:38 – Communication practices

Uses real-time communication
Has Skype chat room for each client and encourages client participation
Transparency is essential

06:00 – Being extreme

Times when distractions need to be eliminated
Times when you need to be collaborative

06:40 – Tools

Skype
Email
Ticketmaster
Clutch: universal feed that allows you to track projects
Kanban
Kanban Pad

11:45 – Consultancies

Reputation is key
Caring gives you a competitive edge
Treat client how you wish to be treated
How can we make things better and improve as a provider of service

14:10 – Building a remote culture

Geographic centers where you can cowork
Silly customs can help build the culture of a dispersed team
PBEOD: Production by end of day
Deploy Master: rotating person in charge each day

23:40 – History of The Hybrid Group

Meet tons of like-minded people, especially at conferences
Evolution of Ron’s previous consultancy

29:35 – Pair programming and when to do it

Pairing is done to solve a problem and to have people looking at code collaborativly
Screen-share-style pairing
Pairing with a client
Solving a particularly difficult problem
Do anything all the time is not a good approach to solving problems

36:48 – Does agile development work?

38:30 – Family and distributed work

Avoid commute times
Choose your own environment for productivity
Having control over your own destiny
Investing in people rather than infrastructure

41:50 – The Kids Ruby Project

Fantastic developers started programming very young
Computer education in schools is decreasing for programming type jobs

50:55 – Advice for future dispersed teams

Cultivate an attitude of transparency
Share information
Truth will set you free
Be ethical

agile dispersed teams distributed teams Interviews pair programming podcast tools

About the Author: Avdi Grimm

Husband, father, software cultivator, and amateur community builder, Avdi has been leading and participating in dispersed software development teams since 2007. He works from home in Southern Pennsylvania, and loves the fact that working remotely enables him to spend more time with his wife and four children.