This week I go into hiring developers and how you determine whether or not they'd make a good employee. The hard thing with hiring is that you really don't know what you're getting until you've made the hire.

You can look at their code, pair with them, and talk to them to get a feel for who they are and how they operate, but in the end, there's only one definitive test—putting them to work and seeing how they work out.

This turned out to be a great interview with David Heinemeier Hansson. He's the creator of the Ruby on Rails web framework and a partner at 37 signals. We discussed what inspired him to build Ruby on Rails and work in Ruby. We talked about how 37 signals approaches things. We went into the Rails community and its ecosystem.

A few things that were mentioned:

On entrepreneurship, David tells us that building a company and concept has never been easier or cheaper. The barrier to entry is extremely low. You need more than programming power or business acumen to start a company. You need people who have an actual skill that will move the product or service forward.