Site author here. I welcome all feedback on the site!
[There's more I'd love to write, but I found I was losing motivation to work on it in my Copious Spare Time(tm), so I thought I'd try promoting it -- knowing that others are paying attention to it will help me keep mine focused on it too.]
I make daily use of GitX for visualizing the state of a repo, and it's got a pretty nice UI for building commits as well. (It's Mac-only, though.) Apparently there are several forks that have added new functionality on top of the version I use, but I'm comfortable enough at the command line now that I haven't bothered checking any of them out.
For those who enjoyed this talk, Corey Donohoe gave an awesome presentation at Cascadia RubyConf that goes into more detail about what they use Hubot for, and also mentions deploying branches to a subset of their boxes. It was one of the best talks of the conference: http://confreaks.net/videos/608-cascadiaruby2011-shipping-at...
I moved to Portland from California in 2001. I love it here, and can't imagine ever moving back. That being said, the big adjustment for me (and for many folks moving from further south) isn't the rain. It's that the days are so much shorter in the wintertime, and even when the sun is technically up, you can't see it through the cloud cover.
It's easy to love Portland in the summer (and, having grown up in Sacramento with weeks of temperatures over 110 degrees, I was very surprised to discover that I actually like summer now). The real test is whether you still love it in the middle of your second or third winter. ;>
There's also hackerbuddy.com, which exists to pair up wannabe hackers with wannabe mentors. Might not help you find someone local, though. For that, user groups are the way to go. Looks like there's an SF Python Meetup group that meets somewhat irregularly, and BayPIGgies down in Mountain View (which makes for a late night on Caltrain, but maybe once a month that's okay?).
The last such place I worked was in a relay service call center. It was right smack in the middle of your retail/food service to office/cubicle continuum.
But yes, "organization" would work nicely for both. Also: "team".
How is it not HN material? This reminds me of the 2006 Malcolm Gladwell piece about "Million Dollar Murray" that showed up here last summer ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1582582 ). Both stories pose a problem that has a well-known set of "accepted" solutions, and describe a novel and counterintuitive solution for an edge case. Which sounds like one definition of a hack to me.
Granted, the approach described here is more morally ambiguous than Gladwell's piece, because it has the added dimension of allowing people to continue to harm themselves. But I think there are interesting arguments to be made in both cases, and I'm glad to have had this piece brought to my attention.
If I had more upvotes, I'd give them to this statement. However, I'd be surprised if there weren't a nontrivial number of Rails developers who totally identify with that. The service is laughably simplistic for my day-job environment, but it isn't aimed at us. For hosting a four-hour app on Heroku, that for whatever reason needs to be client-editable, it's great.