CNET Networks, Inc. (the "Company" or "CNET") is a global media company producing a branded Internet network, a computer product database, a print publication, and television and radio programming for both consumers and businesses.
In this interview we talk to Seth Thomas Rasmussen who works on the CHOW and Chowhound sites under the CNET Networks Entertainment and Lifestyle brand.
BACKGROUND
Q: How did you come to be working at CNET?
I started working at CNET in April of 2007. Chris Wanstrath let me know that they were looking to hire. I was looking to be hired, so it was a good setup.
Q: What is your background?
I started doing web design and development for my high school drumline. After high school I got an A.A.S. in Multimedia and Web Design. I spent my first few years at my first "real" job learning things I should have learned in school such as the importance of standards, separation of concerns and the basics of web programming. In general, I came from more of a design and interaction focus than, say, computer science.
Q: How easy was it to get Rails adopted at CNET?
I'm not sure what it was like getting Rails in the door at CNET. When I came around, CHOW and Chowhound had been online for almost a year. I'm told it was initially brought up by Mike Tatum and Tim Myrtle who had been using it for Wayfaring. Chris and PJ Hyett, now at Err Free, along with Evan Weaver, were key to getting CHOW and Chowhound off and running on Rails.
There is increasing interest in Ruby and Rails around CNET. Having some significant Java systems in place, I've talked with several people who are interested JRuby in particular.
Q: What is your work environment like?
The office space is basically one large room with half-cubes and offices located at the headquarters in San Francisco. I spend varying amounts of time there and elsewhere such as my apartment. Other than things like having that freedom of location, one awesome perk is definitely the leftovers and test samples from the food team!
I mostly work with small teams, though we do integrate with larger groups and systems with CNET. A real joy is working with such a concentration of passion and talent. I fear that reads like cliché bullshit, but I've no reason to kiss ass here, people.. it really is a fantastic group all around.
PROJECTS
Q: What kind of projects do you work on at CNET?
I work mostly on CHOW and Chowhound. I am part of the Entertainment and Lifestyle group at CNET which includes those properties as well as some others like Gamespot, TV.com and Urban Baby. CHOW and Chowhound are the only ones on Rails, though Urban Baby recently saw work begun to move elements of it over to Rails.
One of the features I've spent the most time on for CHOW so far is Places. Users can create records of places and link them in the context of Chowhound discussions. We recently launched Member Recipes wherein users can publish recipes either by entering from scratch or cloning an existing recipe and making modifications. Though they work mostly with a vendor platform and their own video production staff and tools, I've worked some with the video team and I just wanted to call them out because they are doing some really awesome stuff.
I've done some work in integrating OpenSearch on CHOW(add us in Firefox or IE7!), and hopefully we'll see some effort put into a CHOW API one of these days. Lately I've been focused on expanding our facility for running contests and challenges on the site, integrating the recently released user recipe features in particular.
There are several other features and areas of concern I deal with, but that's a decent sampling.
Q: What is your typical development process at CNET?
Product, sales, editorial and a handful of other influences produce the features that we then develop and maintain. We don't adhere to any formal practices or methodologies per se, though we take bits from here and there like most people. The Urban Baby team is trying some agile processes on their current work. Our test suites are a salad of test/unit, test/spec and rspec.
We run an edge revision of Rails and adhere to RESTful design as much as is reasonable. The applications are a mix of DIY and vendor plugins and systems. Urban Baby will see its blogs relaunched on Rails code converted from a Typo base which will eventually be integrated further with the plugins and other resources used to support CHOW and Chowhound.
I work closest with about eight other people, with handfuls scattered about the periphery. Of that initial eight, three comprise the current engineering team with a fourth working on a contract basis.
Q: What kind of infrastructure do you run your sites on?
We have a few Redhat boxes running a mongrel cluster supported by Apache and MySQL.
Q: Do you always use Rails as a preference over other languages?
Not necessarily, but the vast majority of what I develop against and maintain is Ruby and Rails.
Q: In your experience where has Rails proved to be the most challenging?
Rails can be confusing to debug before you know about things like how sometimes errors just get swallowed. I've hit a stride with my testing in Rails in recent months, and I've found that functional test coupling of controllers and views is a bit of a shame. I've yet to try Test::Rails or other alternatives other than stubbing out renders in my own tests. ActionMailer is a bit of a siren with the way it leads you on like it has "normal" Rails views, only to leave you marooned in a bit of a foggy abyss.
Q: What is the best part about using Rails?
I enjoy the higher level designs and expressions it encourages. The stuff conducive to RESTful design that is being worked in currently is also quite nice. And of course it's running on Ruby!
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