David J Rice

Recently at work, we were looking to hire a contractor to spread some of the work load. As this person would be working directly with me on a big project, and time is already short. I wanted to make sure that they were of a calibre were I wouldn’t end up spending more time educating and checking on them than I would actually doing things in the first place… so I made sure we got a code sample before an interview was arranged.

Reading through someone’s work, a lot becomes apparent of how they think, they’re methodologies and in general how suitable they are for the role they will fill. This is why hiring from the open source community reduces the risk that you are going to hire dead weight. David Heinemeier Hansson has a good article on this topic.

When I was looking through the submitted code I found use of a lot of things you shouldn’t be doing in rails. Also, it was an authentication system… I read a couple of lines and thought, wait a second i’ve seen a lot of this before. A quick check of the plugins directory and I found that yes, acts_as_authenticated and acl_system2 were both being used. Fair enough I thought, i’ve used them on a lot of the projects I work on, i’ll just have a look and see how they’ve been extended…

Looking into things further, I couldn’t help but laugh. Everything was from the acts_as_authenticated stikipad Including, yes hilariously; the password reset code that I had written. What a coincidence :)

So the moral of this story is; whenever you claim ownership of something, make sure that at least some aspect of it is unique. Also that it’s very hard to blag your way within a small community like Ruby on Rails and not be caught out.