The Fruits of Unspace Labour

posted by pete on January 11th, 2010

People often ask us what we're working on, and many times it's a hard question to answer. Whether it's because it's an internal system that can't be seen on the public web, or just something that takes a long time to get rolling for any number of complex reasons, Unspace often goes for long stretches when it probably seems like we're a little quiet.

Today is not one of those times!

CommunityLend

We met Michael Garrity in 2006 and were immediately impressed with his vision for social lending in Canada. He quickly brought Colin Henderson on board and we started to build the first version of what became CommunityLend.

Almost everyone at Unspace has worked on the project since, and the single most common question we get asked is "when is [CommunityLend] going to launch?" We've always explained that it's complicated; Michael had the foresight to seek regulatory approval before launching — a gotcha that temporarily shut down US competitor Prosper and got them fined millions of dollars.

Unfortunately it took several years to get all of the regulatory hurdles behind us, and in the interim there have been many changes to the original vision as well as new faces on their team, such as Duarte "ModernMod" DaSilva, who is part of the extended Unspace family now.

CommunityLend is now in a "soft-launch" state while they prepare their full rollout. They're already getting some amazing coverage in the media, my favourite so far being "Lending goes online" in the Financial Post.

Today, Michael uploaded a great video that quickly explains what CommunityLend is all about:

United Nations Global Compact

We met Venu Keesari at our monthly Rails Pub Nite event in 2007. He was a PHP developer interested in Rails that ultimately moved to New York City and took a job with the UN Global Compact.

The United Nations Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.

Cloves Carneiro Jr., Joshua Wehner and Wesley Hodgson worked with Venu over the Fall season to relaunch the UNGC website on Rails. The new site went live at the beginning of January and new features will continue to be added.

One of the reasons we're excited about the UNGC project is that it's an example of an important, highly visible site running Ruby 1.9 in production. There's still a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about Ruby 1.9 in the wild, and we're hoping that UNGC is a milestone that helps prove 1.9 is ready for primetime. The UN has a mandate to use open source software, and Venu is pushing hard to get Ruby solutions deployed throughout the organization.

Congratulations to all involved, both at CommunityLend and at the UN Global Compact.

VidQue and Nice Entity launch

posted by pete on December 7th, 2009

Last week Lukas Dryja launched VidQue, a major update to the site which was originally known as Nizmlab. TechCrunch says VidQue aims to build a better mousetrap by applying what you could refer to as a social filter to videos shared online.

Today Shawn Allison launched Nice Entity. Character entites serve as references to symbols, shapes and other glyphs that are not commonly encodable in HTML. They’re useful for displaying characters beyond the normal range of A – Z, 0 – 9 and the other standard punctuation marks present on the keyboard.

It’s always really exciting when the people we work with release new projects. Please check out VidQue and Nice Entity, and tell your friends.

Shiny, happy tech scene

posted by pete on September 4th, 2009

I admittedly lost interest in reading NOW and eye — Toronto’s two free weeklies — a long time ago. However, last week’s cover caught me eye.

The article essentially suggested that Toronto was a technology backwater, a series of failed promises and unrealized dreams — mostly because we don’t have Google Transit.

I have to take a particular umbrage at this notion, as most of my friends are the sort of people that work their asses off making sure the premise of this article isn’t true.

And so, I wrote a letter to the editor. Yesterday, they ran it:

What credentials does Joshua Errett have to write about technology in Toronto (NOW, August 27-September 2)?

Errett paints a dismal picture. Despite the efforts of some bureaucrats, Toronto is not “Silicon Valley North,” and hallelujah for that. Our vibrant and connected tech community actually gets results!

There have been more than 20 DemoCamp events, #hoHOTo has raised $35K for the food bank, and some of the hottest tech start-ups in the world are based in the GTA.

You can’t get coffee at Queen and Spadina without seeing a bona fide tech celeb, while geek socialites frequently have to make hard decisions about which event they’re going to hit up… on a Monday.

Errett goes on at length about Mozilla (yawn) but fails to mention that the open-source myttc.ca provides amazing transit trip planning today.

It’s significantly better than anything Google offers, and it was created by Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan right here in Toronto after they met at TransitCamp.

To describe Toronto’s tech scene as anything other than a shining example is just not reporting on the facts.

Pete Forde
Unspace Interactive
Toronto

200 Rubyists do it together with the lights on

posted by pete on August 6th, 2009

If you’re ever at a gathering whether a significant number of Rubyists are in attendance, don’t be so surprised if the room spontaneously erupts into a cacophony of vowel noises that sound vaguely like a Gregorian chant. This hmmmmmmm might gradually transition into “hissing and shushing” or arrhythmic rubbing and snapping noises which can be made with one’s hands.

Last year at RubyFringe there was a very important moment during Nick Sieger’s amazing Jazzers and Programmers presentation. Nick was playing short clips of jazz music as a way to illustrate the history and evolution of the art form, and how many concepts like improvisation and being in “the zone” are remarkably similar to coding. Back stage, I was genuinely terrified that people in the audience would be walking out; they came for talks about Ruby, and here we were teaching them about jazz.

Yet when I peeked out from behind the stage, everyone was paying rapt attention. When Nick played music, the majority of people closed their eyes and listened. I had a powerful epiphany: these people can learn new APIs on their own, but they came here to find meaning and be inspired. I no longer feared retribution!

My very first instinct as FutureRuby curator was to contact Misha Glouberman, a local artist, instructor, facilitator, and all around trickster. He’s best known for his long running Trampoline Hall lecture series, but what had captured my imagination was a video I’d seen online from his birthday party.

I asked Misha if we could collaborate on a version of these “Cobra” experimental noise workshops for the FutureRuby audience. This was a very risky creative decision, for both of us. As a musician and appreciator of sonic oddities, I see many connections with the spirit of the event, with Nick’s talk, with the nature of wild experimentalism that fuel folks like why the lucky stiff, whose Poignant Guide to Ruby drew me to this community in the first place.

Photo by Christian Metts

However, all of these roads go back to John Cage. He’s likely most notorious for 4’33”, a composition for piano which consists entirely of musical rests. That’s right, it’s just four and a half minutes of silence. However, his influence goes far beyond making fun of his wealthy patrons.

Could this whimsy be captured at FutureRuby? How would a room full of Rubyists respond to being told to put away their laptops so that they could make primitive, guttural noises for an hour?

Now, while I would never pick favourites I really think most attendees will agree that this session was a huge success. Not only was it a lot of fun, but 200 Rubyists did it together with the lights on. Go ahead and click on Misha to start the video.

I strongly suggest that you set aside an hour, put on a good pair of headphones, and blow this bad boy up to full screen so that you can get into the mindset. It’s pretty awesome; we had about 6 cameras going, and a really nice set of mics to capture stereo sound. You can really hear things moving around in space. I guarantee that you’ve never seen anything like this before, and certainly not with the faces of Yehuda Katz, Nathan Weizenbaum, and the jadedPixel crew in the audience. I don’t want to encourage anyone to jump around, but at 21:00 Misha succeeds in executing a sonic version of Conway’s Game of Life.

Thanks again to Misha for being an excellent performer, and thanks to the FutureRuby attendees who trusted me enough to let this happen. If you’re interested in making these sorts of noises again, Misha occasionally offers workshops through his Misha Glouberman School of Learning which I highly recommend.

Comic by Nick Wolfe of Name Removed

Logos have designers. Brands have managers.

posted by pete on July 30th, 2009

Unspace is working on a really cool design and user experience project for a client right now. Lukas Dryja (who runs his awesome boutique design consulting company Kolor out of Unspace HQ) and I found ourselves having a very interesting conversation about logos and brands.

Jayson Zaleski at Kolor had this to contribute:

An identity requires strategic thinking. If a company is to be successful in today’s saturated market of innovators and followers, it needs to command attention. Attention is gained through delivering a consistent promise within/through quality of product/service, fulfilling audience expectations in the established relationship, and brand projection. To be memorable, all of these elements require constant policing.

However, the brand starts with the logo. It is the most universally-applied element within the brand platform. Copy writing, photography, advertising and marketing all require very targeted and consistent messaging, yet the logo is the most important of all elements.

It needs to function effectively from a technical perspective:

• Does it reduce well?
• Does it hold up on screen without loosing detail?
• Does it gain attention on a t-shirt as well as on the side of a building?

Also, it needs to communicate who you are and some aspect about what your company does. It is your business card, introducing who you are when you are not around to do it yourself. If your logo fails to communicate your distinct personality, it will fail to resonate after it is out of sight (and out of mind). It needs to hold enough conceptual might in order to provide a visual palette for the brand.

A logo doesn’t just work in the middle of a white area… it requires a larger narrative, and this narrative will provide a dynamic environment for the logo to work within.

Now, I am but a lowly programmer… but I can tell you that the brand is not “just” a logo. A brand is a personality, a character. It’s a feeling that your customers associate with it when they think about you. Brand managers spend their time planning the persona of the business, and it’s a vital part of their strategy. They think of brands as people.

Close your eyes and picture Mr. Harley Davidson walking into a bar. You and I are both thinking of the same dude. That doesn’t happen by accident!

That’s why a clever logo and a catchy domain that is available is not branding. Like every other successful online business, your brand needs a visual language and identity of its own to stand out from the crowd.

Why geeks change careers

posted by pete on July 27th, 2009

I recently exchanged a few good emails with Joshua Fruhlinger, a journalist. He was working on an article for IT World about the reasons people might stop working on Microsoft tools in favour of open source solutions like Rails, WordPress or Drupal. The article came out today and I’m happy with it. My contributions are on page 3.

Thanks Josh!

I am hearing more and more geeks changing jobs, regardless of the current economic “situation”. I’m really happy that Josh focused on the role of fear in starting Unspace. Fear is a natural motivator, and on a base level it’s fear that keeps us growing.

Any readers recently switch jobs? Are you glad?

City Limits

posted by mike on July 21st, 2009

Here in Toronto, we've been dealing with a strike by the local municipal union. The most noticeable thing about the strike is that nobody's garbage is getting picked up, which predictably means that your average Joe is getting pretty upset.

Last Friday we launched http://www.cupestrike.com to give local folks the ability to cast a vote about whether they support or oppose the strike, and to chime in with their two cents. This is the first step in a larger project we're calling Pinionated, which will aim to provide pseudo-accurate, geographically-localized opinion polling.

An item of interest to you, O consumer of syndication, might be that anyone can vote -- without giving any personal information. We ask for your opinion, your name, your whereabouts, and your two cents (if you feel like giving them), but only the opinion is mandatory. Interestingly enough, we got roughly the same results as this recent Angus Reid poll. One would assume that people would engage in shenanigans and try to multi-vote (pretty easy to figure out how), but so far it hasn't happened.

Score one for human decency and the honor system... I think.

FutureRuby is all of us

posted by pete on July 12th, 2009

I’m pleased to say that FutureRuby has been a huge success, however you want to measure it. There has been several running themes: programming Ruby, programming life, programming ourselves… We iterate through failure to find success, happiness, and in some cases, anarchy.


Thanks once again to Kieran Huggins for taking this shot. A high-res, non-animated version is here on Flickr.

Thank you to Meghann Millard, our conference director, for connecting all of the dots. I am indebted to all of the speakers for sharing their knowledge, and I sincerely appreciate the tireless efforts of all of our volunteers.

It’s pretty clear that people who understand why it’s important to participate in an event like FutureRuby are amongst the most interesting, eloquent, and in some cases wildly eccentric people walking the earth today. The next time you’re at a tech event and the crowd spontaneously breaks into a hissing, clapping, Gregorian fit… I hope that history remembers that it all started at FutureRuby.


To the future!

Is this really necessary?

posted by pete on July 7th, 2009

Accordion Guy's (RubyFringe) Toronto Guides

posted by pete on July 3rd, 2009

Last year we ran a conference called RubyFringe which was pretty alright. Leading up to the event, Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla wrote a series of amazing articles describing getting around Toronto and things to expect while you’re here. They deserve a dust-off now that FutureRuby is around the corner.

• Where did all the cigarettes go?
• Getting from the airport to the hotel
• Boozin’ in Accordion City
• The lay of the land - part 1
• Best damn cookie in town
• Active Surplus aka Hardware Nirvana
• The lay of the land - part 2
• The unofficial IRC back-channel

It’s worth noting that the IRC back-channel from RubyFringe is still running.

Today is the last day to register for FutureRuby

posted by pete on June 29th, 2009

Only half a day left to register for FutureRuby.

Why should you come? I think Joey deVilla said it best:

“Many people who went declared it the best conference they’d ever attended, and many who passed up the opportunity kicked themselves for missing it. Those pale next to the highest praise for the conference: the fact that after attending RubyFringe, a half-dozen handful of attendees were so inspired that they quit their day jobs to strike out on their own doing Ruby development.”

If you miss the cutoff, you can’t say that we didn’t warn you.

Fast times at ScoreMobile

posted by pete on June 24th, 2009

We work closely with TheScore, a really cool sports TV network and satellite radio station based in Toronto. They have been super aggressive with their new media strategy, and it’s starting to really pay off: between favourable coverage in Broadcaster Magazine, to their ScoreMobile iPhone Edition app consistently being a top-10 sports application in the iTunes App Store, we’re really proud of our ability to help them expand their reach.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of work that goes into delivering a consistent, timely feed of information to hundreds of thousands of sports junkies all using different devices. Everything is cached, which gets tricky when you support a significant amount of end-user customization like favourite teams. Since the beginning, we’ve worked really hard to eliminate redundant calculations and make all consumers of the data use the same back-end interfaces.

Our big news is that in addition to a major revamp of the iPhone application, we’re now generating a device-neutral JSON feed. This feed is now being used to power the just-released ScoreMobile BlackBerry Edition, which was featured prominently on several media outlets late last week.

Other new changes include a much snappier user interface which is better at remembering state between uses, great support for using the app when the Internet is unreachable, and last but not least, video.

Sports geeks, take note: ScoreMobile is setting the high bar for real-time sports in the mobile space.

Employment.nil? Job Fair was a success!

posted by pete on June 13th, 2009

I’m happy to report that our weird little community Ruby expo was a big hit. We had 23 posters made, and about 150 visitors over 7 hours by my rough estimation. The Ontario Minister of Small Business, Harinder Takhar came and met several of the Rubyists before presenting us with a nice framed certificate of awesomeness. That was pretty cool!

Most importantly, many contacts were exchanged, interviews were set up, and I’m reasonably sure I watched someone get hired in front of me. That’s a good feeling, and while I’m not going to say that planning this event in a month was easy (everyone thank logistics hero Meghann Millard!) this really is an idea with wings, and you should do it in your own community. I say community in reference both to the city you live in, as well as the language and framework that you use.

If I was going to do anything differently, I would make the event much shorter. Employment.nil? was 11am-6pm, but I think 1pm-5pm would be “just right”. Also, I would sleep more that 50 minutes in the 60 hours leading up to the event.

Banning computers was probably the best way to force creativity that I’ve ever witnessed. People made flip-books, laser-etched plexiglass business cards, ran a trivia quiz game, and generally did things that would never have happened if it was business as usual.

Thanks to Meghann, all of the presenters, the Gladstone Hotel, the folks who recorded video, Kandice Ardiel and Harinder Takhar, and everyone who helped get the word out.

Joey DeVilla did an amazing writeup on his blog, if you want the full scoop! And now, videos! If you have more, add them to the Vimeo Ruby Job Fair channel.

Employment.nil? The Minister of Small Business Visits from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Employment.nil? Introduction from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

I think that we can agree, that one takes the cake in the “flattering previews” category.

Employment.nil? Andrew Burke from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Employment.nil? Enrico Bianco from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Employment.nil? Bart G from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Employment.nil? Joshua on PostRank from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Employment.nil? Krispy and Joey from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Those were all recorded by Anita Kuno! Here’s Eric Taylor’s contribution:

Rocket Ship! from Pete Forde on Vimeo.

Ilia uploaded a 10 minute summary (I have a cameo at the 8:05 mark):

And finally, here’s Joey’s photo set on Flickr. I have some rad black and white medium format shots, but they haven’t been scanned yet. Sorry!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

FutureRuby update: June 15th cutoff, Avi Bryant announced, Hampton Catlin threatened

posted by pete on June 12th, 2009

We're pleased to announce that after two long months of careful conference curating — say that three times fast — Avi Bryant is the final feather in the cap of the FutureRuby speaker roster.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Avi Bryant is an old-school Rubyist who was seduced by Smalltalk. He released Seaside, an awesome continuation-based web application server; this became the platform on which he built the incredible DabbleDB. After giving a talk on Smalltalk at RailsConf, he was contracted to lead a team at GemStone to create MagLev — a widely misunderstood Ruby implementation running on the Smalltalk VM that could be a game changer upon its release. Avi will come and pollute our minds with his applied web heresies; bring an open mind and leave your assumptions at the door.

We also have a special bonus offering in the realm of speakers — the charm of one Hampton 'The Pump' Catlin. This is tentative as we have a full schedule... but we have high hopes. Hampton is our secret weapon in the unlikely event that one of our speakers gets detained at the border for trying to smuggle in a gulag's-worth of weaponry.

Here's the final Future Ruby Leaders of Tomorrow, Today! speakers roster:

Adam Blum (Rhomobile/Rhodes)
Giles Bowkett (Archaeopteryx/ENTP)
Avi Bryant (DabbleDB/MagLev)
Hampton Catlin (HAML/Wikipedia/Unspace)
Austin Che (MIT/Synthetic Biology)
Paul Dowman (EC2 on Rails/Gigpark)
Rob Ellis, Brian LeRoux, Brock Whitten (Nitobi/Phonegap)
Jonathan Dahl (Tumblon/RailsSpikes)
Damen Evans, Ron Evans (TalentBoom)
Mischa Glouberman (Terrible Noises for Beautiful People)
Ilya Grigorik (AideRSS)
Jesse Hirsh (Openflows Networks Ltd)
Molly Holzschlag (HTML5, molly.com)
Matthew Knox (Scheme)
Anita Kuno
Collin Miller (What Tech)
Foy Savas (The Merb Way/Assembly)
Nathaniel Talbott (Terralien)
Francisco Tomalsky (20 North/Cappuccino)
Joseph Wilke (Cucumber)
Dr. Nic Williams (Morca)

So you want it? Get it. FutureRuby is all about "Leaders of Tomorrow, Today!"

Are you a leader or a follower? Three more days until rush pricing starts, and if you miss the cut-off... well, you can't say that we didn't warn you.

A response to "Ruby at ThoughtWorks"

posted by pete on June 12th, 2009

Martin Fowler is a seriously smart dude who quite literally wrote the book on refactoring code. I caught his keynote at RailsConf 2006 and he spoke well. There’s no question that he is someone that people are advised to pay attention to.

He recently posted an article called “Ruby at ThoughtWorks” that I generally enjoyed. It provided lots of subjective yet informed statistics about the real benefits of using Ruby on web application development projects, specifically when Rails is involved.

However, there was a very specific section that made me fall out of my chair:

One thing we have seen is that you shouldn’t expect these productivity increases to turn up right away. I’ve heard several times that people were alarmed in early weeks about the slow progress of a new Ruby team - a consequence of what I call the Improvement Ravine. It does take time for a Ruby team to get the hang of how the platform works and during that time they’ll be slower than you expect.

The improvement ravine is a common phenomenon and a usual palliative is to ensure there are some experienced people on the team.

Say what?

I go out of my way to have a friendly relationship with our competitors, so I am choosing my words very carefully when I suggest that I am deeply distressed by the implications of these statements.

Like Unspace, ThoughtWorks is a “time and materials” software consulting firm. Potential clients approach a professional services entity to short-cut the hiring of top level talent in a particular, often niche technology. The primary motivator to hire ThoughtWorks or Unspace is that we have searched far and wide for the best minds in Ruby — and for a price, you can have access to those personalities.

Notice that I didn’t say resources; when we meet with a client, we will specifically suggest that you get access to people like Mike Ferrier, Hampton Catlin, Jeffrey Hardy, Nathan Weizenbaum… people who are recognizable names in the Ruby community. [Jeff is now with 37signals and Hampton is mostly busy with Wikipedia now, but you get the idea.]

Why on earth would you pay any company north of US$200/h per head to assemble a team of people that have never worked on a Ruby project before? Would you still be as excited to commit if you knew that 1 or 2 seasoned talents like Tyler Rooney or Joshua Wehner could do a better job faster than a mash-up of 15 new-to-Ruby former Java developers?

I’m sorry, but this seems really messed up to me.