nickcoyne.com

To follow on from the launch of the Codevader website a few weeks ago, I’ve now got a company blog up. The idea is to get the whole team to post there, so most topics will be Ruby or Rails-related, but there’ll also be general web or business stuff from time-to-time.

This blog will then stick to cycling and other personal pursuits.

It took a few weeks to get it together, but Codevader now has a website - www.codevader.com. Its quite simple to start, but I’ll add some more content over the next month or two.

Codevader is starting to settle down now. We’re bedding in our systems and procedures, and we’re hard at work on a few projects. I finally have my home office sorted out and am no longer sitting amongst a pile of papers and CDs.

Last night was another Geek Dinner, this time at the very nice Wild Fig restaurant (great food!). I did a quick 3-minute talk on Ruby on Rails, largely borrowed from one of DHH’s presentations. It seemed to go down well and I didn’t get attacked by any hecklers

Other talks covered the (obvious) advantages of Python over PHP (I don’t think that was an argument anyone was going to contest), the OLPC project, which included a real laptop for us to play with - pretty impressive. Also a talk on project management, one on mindgames, and probably the most interesting an invitation from Robin Ronne about Ripple, an opensource project to create a networked credit system, sans banks. Very interesting, and an idea that if it takes off, could have far-reaching consequences. Robin’s coming for a job interview tomorrow, so let’s just say he made a favourable impression last night!

Tags: Geekdinner

We’re starting work on an exciting project soon, but there’s an unknown element I haven’t figured out yet.

We’re building a Flash web application which plays a movie. As the movie ends a character in the movie dials a telephone. At that point the user’s phone rings. Surprise! When they answer they are played a pre-recorded message. Since the users have to log in to the application we know who they are.

The challenge is how to make out outgoing call from a website? I’ve come across jaduka.com, but their service only makes US and Canadian calls. Our site needs to call phones in the Netherlands.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how to do this??

I came across an interesting post on Chad Fowler’s blog where he uses the (decidedly unscientific) Google Trends to analyse supply/demand of technologies.

What was very interesting was this chart showing Ruby on Rails interest by region. South Africa is no 2! WTF?! If there’s so much interest here, why does no-one answer my job ads? Hell, our last ad actually advertised for PHP developers looking to learn Rails - we’ll train them! That’s how much we want Rails developers.

Technorati Tags: Ruby on Rails

Never thought I’d ever attend something called a Geek Dinner, but after doing the test at http://www.innergeek.us/geek.html it appears I do qualify. I went with low expectations after attending Feb’s 27 dinner which wasn’t networky enough for my liking. Joe had put a lot of effort into organising it though so there had to be some value. Which there was…

Highlights:

• met some interesting people
• bumped into some people I hadn’t seen for a long time
• drank some nice wine
• better organised than the 27 dinner

Lowlights:

• almost all of the talks over-ran their allocated time. I think we need to do this Oscar-style. When there’s a minute to go we start playing some background music, which gets progressively louder. When speakers still don’t get the hint we have some nice looking ladies who escort you gently away from the microphone and back to your seat.
• lots of wireless people, talking about stuff I don’t really care about, and/or don’t understand
• mostly stuck at one table for the duration of the evening, which made really meeting more than the 6 others at your table a little difficult. How we make people swap tables between courses?

All in all, a good job. Well done Joe!

Tags: GeekDinner

Not often that I feature one of the sites that we’ve built here, but this one’s close to my heart. BikeMaxPower is our team sponsor and the new site which launched on Friday features lots of useful articles on power training. Also there are blogs by Peter, owner of BikeMax racing in the Vets category, and Bruce, who races in the Subvets in Joburg. They’re also selling powertaps and a few other bike goodies on the site.

BikeMax is closing down their phyical training facility and focusing on coaching through the online interface of Training Peaks. Pretty effective as it lets your coach see exactly what you’re up to once you’ve uploaded your workout files from Cycling Peaks WKO+.

Been doing some programming lately and as a result of being so rusty I’ve had to resort to Google more than a few times to figure out usually pretty simple things. Along the way I’ve come across some handy links -

• Ruby Inside has this handy list of some clever tips to use with Rails.
• Err The Blog lists all the programs and tools that make up his Rails toolbox. I found a few useful goodies in there that I hadn’t heard of before.

Then I’ve been working through the impressive Beginning E-Commerce with Rails, which is the first book that’s clearly gotten across the practicalities of test-driven development (TDD) to my thick brain. TDD is a LOT of PT, but there are some very clear benefits. I’m going to be copying their style of tests into some of our current projects to improve our test coverage, which is pretty poor at the moment.