Christopher Spring

Hiring freelance developers has come into the spot-light for me recently and i’ve been trying to work out how one attracts the best candidates.

I’ve recently been involved with posting a WordPress job on oDesk, and the candidates that applied have been very interesting - their skills tend to reflect a singular methodology or paradigm: the skills they list all reflect the same kinds of idioms.

What would interest me greatly is a developer who lists skills from different paradigms, or at least exposure to different idioms: think of techniques used in Java vs. techniques used in Ruby vs. techniques used in Haskel. They all require different ways of approaching problems and different ways of thinking. I guess it’s through exposure that you learn to gauge effective ways of solving problems.

So, if you know any developers with a strong background in Haskel, Java and Ruby who wants to work on a WordPress project, please ask them to leave a comment on this post :P

So, you’re using ActionMailer and you get an icredibly funky error when trying to send mails - something like this:

Net::SMTPSyntaxError: 501 Invalid characters detected

Round about now is when you start thinking about that career in advertising you passed up when you look at your environment.rb file, which contains something like this:

ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {  
 :address => "mail.fbi.com", 
 :port => 666,  
 :user_name => "mailman@fbi.com",  
 :password => "billclinton",  
 :authentication => :cram_md5
} 
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true

Nothing unusual or special. In fact, it looks like every other damn email configuration you’ve set up to date. But here’s the catch: In the ‘HELO’ phase of the connection with the mail server, the domain name of your machine is sent to the mail server - and this is where the magic dissapeared.

To fix, simply add the domain setting with an appropriate value to your smpt_settings, so that it looks something like this:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = { 
 :address => "mail.fbi.com",
 :port => 666, 
 :user_name => "mailman@fbi.com", 
 :password => "billclinton", 
 :domain => "localhost.com",
 :authentication => :cram_md5
}

Jumping to conclusions and dealing in “what-if” scenarios without investigation is a form of time compound interest: vast armies of time is sucked into a vortex of nothingness.

If you dont like something, don’t moan about it! Implement something you think is better and campare from there!