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.

Holy crap! Shopify launches an application store

posted by pete on June 2nd, 2009

I’m completely floored how our friends at Shopify have just lapped Amazon and eBay by providing an open API and sticking to their principles. On their 3rd anniversary, original Rails core team member Tobias Luetke explains the rationale behind the new Shopify Application Store in this post:

However, there are a lot of common elements to every e-commerce store. There is this small nucleus of core functionality that all software has to provide (and most do). These are things like inventory management, order processing, payment processing, shipping support and so on. Shopify excels at all these things—our customer satisfaction rate is north of 90%. However after you are done with all those features something funny happens. The next feature everyone wants is different for each store. Some people want live auctions, some people want a wholesale area, some people want community forums, license key generation, digital delivery, integrations with MS Commerce Server, Oracle Inventory, international tax form printers, etc.

None of these features is particularly hard to implement. The problem is that they fail our basic test which we use to determine whether we should implement a feature or not: Do most of the people need it most of the time?

Tobi makes it sound so simple; in reality he’s fought off demanding customers and the advice of everyone from VCs to old-world European grandmothers who demand Important Things. These are people who are not used to being told that their benign but ultimately selfish wants are not in the greater good. His team knows that the moment you say yes to one person’s pet feature, everyone else wants to know why you can’t add this “simple” idea and that “obvious” module.

Today they are launching with 7 plug-in modules that you can use to customize your Shopify store; I predict that there will be a few dozen by the time FutureRuby rolls around.

This move towards opening up your platform’s core functionality for enhancement is a very literal and exciting interpretation of the PDI (please do investigate) culture that runs deep in Rails; instead of saying no to a feature request, point out that if it’s important to someone then they can do the work to see it implemented. Only now, you can get people to pay you for it, too.

Which “basic assumption” of the web do you think will get turned inside-out next?