Good things taken too far
posted by pete on October 30th, 2008
I know I compare the Ruby world to the music world quite a lot for just one man.
Today, my point is made for me. Lots of talk, yet Rails is still a serious sausage party in late 2008. Is there hope for this to ever change?
[Photo credit goes to the always amazing Liz Clayton, from whom I have now learned the term “bonestorm”.]
Now, we see in Kolor
posted by pete on October 28th, 2008
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs, 2003
I’m really proud to finally announce the official launch of Kolor, a creative collective which boasts founders including Lukas Dryja. Unspace has always existed to incubate our personal projects, and Kolor is no different. Lukas is still here in the Unspace office, and we continue to work closely on several ongoing projects.
Since the beginning, Unspace has offered both design and development consulting. This proved to be a significant differentiation from other development shops, but we never questioned the need to have both sides of the equation present in the same space. We might be known for our development chops, but we couldn’t do what we do without our awesome design team.
However, finding equal footing between the development and design within projects has often been a challenging process. Working on projects with designers in the past we have learned some valuable lessons.
Design requires experimentation
Design is a problem solving activity. One should not assume that a single solution is the right solution. Through experimentation and iteration, different options should be explored in order to create the appropriate solution.
Design is not a technical skill
To Design means planning in addition to style. A great design is the product of asking the right questions and applying the necessary design process. You do not design for it to be beautiful, but rather to work — to serve a purpose.
The client is not the designer
Clients often perceive design as an end solution, or a visual element that becomes an applied skin. Often there is a preconceived notion of what the end product should look like. We don’t participate in RFPs or work from specs, choosing instead to question what is being presented by the client as the end solution.
A good designer will challenge the client’s stylistic needs in order to create a solution that is right for the target audience.
Lukas has long been an integral part of the Unspace team, providing quality design and branding expertise to our clients. During this time, he has also explored other avenues of design, from teaching Interactive Communication at OCAD to working with other clients on freelance projects. Lukas takes particular delight in rocking the boat, insisting on placing the ultimate interests of the client and their audience first.
Over the past year he has been busy defining “Kolor” and its business model with three of his business partners. Kolor is a creative collective, a gathering of designers and visual thinkers working together to provide effective design communication to clients they respect and want to work with. Challenging the design studio model, the Kolor partners are located on opposite ends of the earth. The four partners collaborate online to emulate a studio environment.
Today Kolor officially opens its doors to the world. We are quite proud, and wish them all of the luck they deserve.
The first rule of Byte Club
posted by pete on October 24th, 2008
Byte Club is an excellent new web TV show covering the tech scene here in Toronto. It was instigated by our pal Kristan “Krispy” Uccello, who persevered in spite of many holdups and hardships. Roughly a year later we saw the first of seventeen episodes surface online, a piece on B5 Media.
The show has high production values, Pop-Up Video style peanut gallery comments, and a charismatic and genuinely likable host; Katie Bowes has great hair and a background in improv comedy. The show is produced by a well informed team that have their ear to the ground in Toronto.
I feel that Byte Club deserves you adding its’ feed, but I’m biased: the 2nd and 3rd episodes were published today, and they are based on Unspace and RubyFringe, respectively.
Unspace
I think this episode is great. The show gives a high level overview of what we’re about and more importantly, where we’re coming from. I am excited to show this to our potential clients! Working with their crew was a breeze, and I found I developed a casual rapport with Katie very quickly.
There’s a segment where I look like I’m taking a nap on the wall of our boardroom, and of course watching Hampton lose at Tic-Tac-Toe is not to be missed. You can even catch a glimpse of the inside of our bathroom.
RubyFringe
I don’t know about you, but I’m glad that someone showed up to RubyFringe with a video camera, and proceeded to talk to everyone in sight about what was happening there.
If Byte Club can keep up its high quality production standards, then they will have a hit on their hands. You can join their Facebook group here.
Hampton on MobileOrchard Podcast
posted by pete on October 23rd, 2008
MobileOrchard is an awesome new site for iPhone and Android application developers. (In fact, they have a great screencast which gives an overview of Android for iPhone developers you should check out.) It’s run by RubyFringe speaker Dan Grigsby and the prolific Peter Cooper of RubyInside fame.
The first episode of their new podcast went live today, and it’s an interview with none other than our very own Hampton Catlin. If you’re just tuning in now, Hampton is the creator of the popular Haml template engine, the make_resourceful gem, and most recently he created iWik (now iPedia) which has become one of the most popular paid applications on the iTunes Music Store, selling over 50,000 copies to date.
Hampton talks about creating an iPhone app on a whim in three days, the advantages of server side processing, ITMS processing delays, and how it makes sense to wrap up a Safari instance as an application.
Engage Your End-Of-Life Filter
posted by pete on October 22nd, 2008
How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub
We had Tom Preston-Werner pinch-hit for Chris Wanstrath at RubyFringe, and his talk was a big hit. Tom was working on the slightly vapourous Powerset when he and Chris started hacking on the game-changing GitHub a year ago. Here’s an InfoQ interview with Tom at RubyFringe.
In the article linked above, he talked about how as a family man approaching 30 (apparently this is old in software) he decided to choose adventure over stability and follow the crazy instead of the money. Kudos for following your heart, Tom. You rule!
However, I have a serious beef:
Dude, you’re worth a lot more than “300k over three years plus salary”.
Just sayin’.
Return of the Rails Arbitrage
posted by pete on October 21st, 2008
Can Ruby, Rails Make Developers Shine In A Downturn?
Indeed, Walley said, in Engine Yard’s experience, “developing Web applications with Ruby and Rails results in a five-to-six-times project time reduction and a project completion probability increase from the industry average of 10 percent to well over 50 percent. We see this over and over from Engine Yard customers. With many hundreds of customers, this is not a fluke of one customer or a few customers but real, proven savings.”
Echoing Hansson, Walley added, “When times are lean, IT managers are forced to do more with less. Ruby and Rails present a way to do just that. Developers are [rarer] and more expensive in terms of hourly rates, but projects can be cut down from 30 man-months to six man-months. That’s a huge cost savings, plus it’s always good to be done sooner than later.”
All of this to which I can only say:
What economic downturn? We get more calls now — every day — at Unspace than we did in July.
I’ll tell you the true Rails arbitrage: here is a technology which allowed a bunch of anarchist punks — literally high-school dropout musicians — start an internationally respected company with zero cash invested… and we didn’t have to get permission from anyone. Four years in, we pick the projects we want to work on, or just take time off to build our own.
So, what are you waiting for?
The most important video of 2008
posted by pete on October 2nd, 2008
RubyFringe was a retreat for weary but optimistic hackers, locked into a particle accelerator full of passion and rebellion. As a curator, I found myself frequently emotional in response to the raw honesty displayed by people like Nick Sieger and Damien Katz. Maybe that’s the thing; before they were developers who I respected, and now they are friends I could hug. Sure, there was tech talk, but it was watching Zed Shaw’s parting serenade, Leila Boujnane’s reminder to be good, and Hampton Catlin’s piss-and-vinegar belligerence that made it a weekend to remember and be proud of.
Still, nobody really quite expected what happened when Giles Bowkett took the stage to show off his labour of love, Archaeopteryx. Watch “Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator” at InfoQ, now.
There are occasionally fleeting moments in your life when you realize that you are on hand to witness something historically significant. The magic cannot be adequately summarized, much less repeated. This was one of those ripples, and somehow the video of it was finally ready on September 29th — our generation’s probable Black Monday. Watching it again that night — now, months later — I realized that Giles message wasn’t just brilliant, but urgent. It’s political.
We are at war with mediocrity.
Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek has certainly been on a lot of minds lately; I don’t recommend many books, but if you haven’t read it yet, you should. Still, the one thing I felt Tim’s amazing personal freedom manifesto lacked was soul. When I watch Giles work himself into a froth — pretty much begging us to embrace the strange and create art — I see a man who so passionately believes what he is saying that he erases my own self-doubt and yes… makes me believe, too.
I have to admit that we almost didn’t have Giles come. His ideas sounded improbable and weird, and his gas mask bio shot was unsettling. We figured that we could put him on Friday night as part of the entertainment, until he straightened us out: “This is not just a DJ set, this is my business! I have important things to say!” he told me in more words. At that point I was just so bewildered that I just said, “Hey, sure, why not?”
That Giles manages to Pearl Harbor the very foundations of the modern software world so effortlessly in some ways should not surprise anyone, as truly radical ideas rarely come from predictable sources. In a sense, the pacing and levity he injects into every intentional phrase of his performance is really nothing more than a hypnotic parlour trick designed to distract us. We’re so busy laughing that we just let this crazy man into the back door of our subconscious, and he tears down the security net that makes us feel confident and safe doing what we’re doing. He even creates doubt that many of us can honestly answer why we’re doing what we’re doing (or at least give an answer we’re proud of).
I think all programmers need to see this, right now. It could be the common sense antidote to the lies platitudes which keep us warm at night. Sometimes we hit rock bottom as individuals, as a community, and as a society; Google will not be there for us, but Giles might be.
This is a call to action. Clear your schedule, find a projector, make some popcorn and invite people you care about to watch this with you. They don’t even have to be developers! Block out any distractions, and make sure it’s on full screen.
Laugh your ass off, and then talk about what you’ve seen. You might have missed it the first time around, but with any luck we can get the word out: