I’m curious about something. If you’re an independent contractor, consultant or freelancer, are most of your projects one-time gigs or do they more frequently involve long term maintenance? There is a lot of different thinking out there about how to handle ongoing work: batch it up and get it done all at once (and pay for it in one chunk too) or spreading it out over a longer period of time (the pain isn’t as severe, but lasts longer).

Most of my projects start as one-time gigs and then evolve into ongoing maintenance work (assuming the client is pleased with what has been produced, which they generally are). I can think of only two instances where a one-time gig was just that… one-time… and didn’t involve ongoing maintenance. What has your experience been?

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” — Mark Twain

July 29th will mark the fifth anniversary of this blog. I realized today that I have never properly thanked you, my readers, for continuing to support this endeavor. There are so many other things you could be perusing, but you choose to patronize my humble programming blog. For that, I am grateful. Thanks for reading!

This year’s RubyConf is being held in New Orleans on November 11th – 13th.

Count me in.

I’ve only driven through the area once so it’ll be interesting to make a longer visit. Although I’m ultimately keeping my fingers crossed for a Raleigh RubyConf one of these days. Hey, I can dream.

November 30, 2009: Rails 2.3.5 has just been released. I upgrade my production Rails apps and rock on.

February 17 of this year: RubyGems 1.3.6 is released and my apps begin suffering from deprecation warnings. They’re all over the place: when I run a test, when I launch script/console… when I sneeze.

/Users/pelargir/Projects/teascript/config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/rails/gem_dependency.rb:119:Warning: Gem::Dependency#version_requirements is deprecated and will be removed on or after August 2010.  Use #requirement

Rumor has it the deprecation warning will go away with 2.3.6. And 2.3.6 is expected to drop any day. Yay! Problem will be solved soon… or so I thought. I begin waiting.

May 23: 2.3.6 finally drops.
May 24: 2.3.7 drops because of a bug in 2.3.6. What the heck?
May 25: 2.3.8 drops because of a bug in 2.3.7. Okay, this is getting crazy.

Was anyone else embarrassed about the 6-month delay for 2.3.6 followed by two more point releases over the span of three days? This is exactly the kind of anecdote an exec at a Fortune 500 would raise to prevent a move towards Rails and keep the company locked into Java or .NET for another decade. Ugh.

We can do better than this.