Goal-assisting Education
I love learning. There is always more to learn but, what I learn has to directly help me reach my goals for me to stay passionate with it. There are classes that I will attend that I believe will help me improve my applications, but what is also exciting are the classes that surprise you, or the extra tips and pointers you pick up outside the classes from the people you meet and the impromptu discussions.

Absorbing Optimism and Passion.
In my opinion, passion and optimism, founded on persistence and a desire to learn is the recipe for success. I’m looking forward to meeting those of you who absolutely love what you do. You love to code in Ruby. You love creating applications to improve the user’s life, solve the user’s problem, or entertain the user. Particularly, as an Entrepreneur at heart, I want to meet those of you who are optimistic and passionate about the businesses you are starting or have started.

Suggestion and Tip to presenters: If there is something you do not like about Rails or Ruby, then make a suggestion from a positive perspective on how we as a community can make it better. Sharing your frustrations and distaste for something is fine, but useless unless presented with a real solution. I have no desire to be doused in a pessimistic discharge. Criticism is great, but do it from a passionate and optimistic spirit and the community will grow as a result. Do it with negativity and pessimism and its like a cancer that can eat away at a community.

Meeting like-minded people
This goes right along with my previous point, but beyond just being around optimism and passion, I’d like to meet you, hear your plans, your dreams, your stories. Find me, if I don’t find you.

I plan to twitter my experience and may make some posts on here as well. Should be a great time.

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Jason discusses his views of not needing Venture Capital, at least at the beginning. He discusses simple design, not watching your competition, not planning too far in advance, and not spending a lot of time up front designing and planning but instead doing and learning from the outcomes.

If you’ve listened to or read Jason or 37 signals in the past there isn’t much new here, but their thinking is so far outside the stuffy and constraining boxes of the Enterprise and corporate America, that you really can’t hear this enough. I hope it catches on, and I continue to try and preach the same principles and put them in practice in my own projects. I think many people instinctively recoil away from some of these ideas, but I urge you to resist the comfort of, “we’ve always done it this way…it must be working”, and instead consider the principles behind these ideas and the desired outcome of some of this new way of thinking and doing business. I’ve experienced first hand the flip side of these practices in the IT corporate world for the last 15 years. It never ceases to amaze me how every corporation does the same thing with the same results over and over again, including wasting employees time, working on large projects with huge complicated processes that burn time and money and burn out their employees, needless bloated meetings, emphasizing quantity of communication over quality, treating employees like worker bees or worse yet children by requiring them to be in a certain location at a certain time clearly showing them you have no trust in them, and by discouraging their individual thoughts and creative inputs.

I’ve worked with many employees with great potential who were figuratively bound and gagged, stripped of participation and thereby emotional involvement in the project, which demoralizes and prematurely burns out the employee. 37signals does exactly the opposite and you can see it by following the employees of the company, seeing the quality of their projects, and the passion the leaders of the team speak and write with.

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In the past IT was seen as a supplemental skill set. When income was high, business would invest in IT by hiring more IT employees, giving raises and bonuses, and spending money on more training, software and hardware. When low, the opposite occurs. However, many more companies today rely on IT for the entire business as compared with the past when IT was there to assist and create internal reports and other “nice-to-haves”. Now more corporations than ever actually make money from the work of their IT professionals and because of this they cannot cut them as easily as in the past.

As for Rails developers specifically, some feel the hurting economy will help Rails developers. As companies need more IT work, but have less operating income and less venture capital, they may look for shorter development cycles and outsourcing as opposed to funding large internal Enterprise applications often based on more time consuming and less agile coding frameworks.

Recently the FiveRuns blog shared their opinion:

Rails shops are built to do more with less. It’s part of our DNA to be more agile, more nimble, and more productive than developers using “legacy” tools.

They provide other reasons for Rails opportunities being on the rise, including the lower cost to deploy and host Rails applications.

eWeek.com reported David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails, as saying:

I think Rails developers are much better positioned to weather the storm as they generally stand for delivering more with less faster. It’s the traditional mainstream environments that are going to see much more pressure to deliver.

Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard, added:

A slowing economy will likely lead to constrained IT budgets. There’s a good chance this will have a positive impact on the uptake of open-source options, such as Linux, Ruby and Rails.

Read the linked to articles from above for more opinions on why Rails developers should continue to see lots of opportunities. At the recent Tampa Brigade Ruby meetup it certainly sounded as though there was more opportunity than there were developers, and I’ve heard the same thing from several Tampa Bay recruiters now. Let’s hope it stays that way.

What has your experience been so far?

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Thursday

9:00 - 10:15

Keynote

10:25 - 11:05

Scaling Ruby by Gregg Pollack

11:15 - 12:00

No class for me. Take a break. Probably tired from driving in early. Explore the grounds.

Lunch

1:15 - 2:00

JRuby: What, Why, How…Try It Now

2:10 - 2:55

Recovering from Enterprise: how to embrace Ruby’s idioms and say goodbye to bad habits, by Jamis Buck

3:05 - 3:50

Unfactoring From Patterns: Job Security Through Code Obscurity, by Rein Henrichs

Break

4:20 - 5:05

Better Hacking With Training Wheels, by Joe Martinez

5:15 - 6:00

NeverBlock, trivial non-blocking IO for Ruby, by Mohammad A. Ali

Break

Lightning Talks?

Friday

9:30 - 10:15

Ruby 1.9: What to Expect, by Sam Ruby

10:25 - 11:05

All I Really Need to Know* I Learned by Writing My Own Web Framework, by Ben Scofield

11:15 - 12:00

Coding for Failure: All you need to know for building rock solid applications in 45 minutes, by Tammer Saleh

Lunch

1:15 - 2:00

What Every Rubyist Should Know About Threads, by Jim Weirich

2:10 - 2:55

Using Metrics to Take a Hard Look at Your Code, by Jake Scruggs

3:05 - 3:50

Ruby Heavy-Lifting: Lazy load it, Event it, Defer it, and then Optimize it, by Ilya Grigorik

Break

4:20 - 5:05

Components are not a dirty word: modeling your Rails interface with stateful objects, by Mike Pence

5:15 - 6:00

Ruby Kata and Sparring, by Micah Martin

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After trying them on I realized they did not fit. They felt fine most everywhere but the poor little pinky toe was taking some serious, blister inducing punishment. So I visited the Zappos site to find out what my options were. I clicked on my order and it gave a phone number to call to setup a return. It was about 11pm EST and when I called someone picked up immediately. I only had to press one number; no long series of phone menus. The woman on the other end spoke perfect English and was patient and friendly. She set me up with a new pair of shoes, the next size up, to ship the next day, with no restocking fee, no shipping fees, and no return shipping fees. And, they shipped them to me without waiting for me to ship the old ones. She walked me through printing out the return shipping label (which I didn’t need, but welcomed simply because she was so patient and helpful) and told me to ship back the other ones in the original box with the new label. My new shoes arrived 36 hrs later and fit perfectly this time. I had 14 days to return the originals.

In every aspect of customer service and product quality Zappos got it right. It’s a lesson to all of us. They just sell shoes. No great online features. No creative products or services. No amazing innovation. They have a huge line of quality shoes, at normal prices (no discounts that I could see), but with free immediate shipping and triple A customer service, they stand out of the crowd. I know where I’ll be buying my next pair of shoes from.

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Apparently hulu, written in Rails by the way, is on target to make $90 million in its first year. Way to go Hulu and congrats.

Full article here.

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Protonotes
“Protonotes are notes that you add to your prototype that allow project team members to discuss system functionality, design, and requirements directly on the prototype. You can think of it like a discussion board/wiki in direct context of your prototype.”

Loopt
“Loopt transforms your mobile phone into a social compass; connect with friends and get alerted when they are nearby; share your location, status and photos with friends and AIM buddies; explore places and events recommended by friends.”

Facebook
“Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.”

LinkedIn
“Over 23 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities. Stay informed about your contacts and industry. Find the people & knowledge you need to achieve your goals. Control your professional identity online.”

Basecamp
“Project management and collaboration. Collaborate with your team and clients. Schedules, tasks, files, messages, and more.”

Highrise
“Online contact manager and simple CRM. Keep track of who your business talks to, what was said, and what to do next.”

Backpack
“Intranet, group calendar, organizer. Share info, schedules, documents, and to-dos across your company, group, or organization.”

Campfire
“Real-time group chat for business. It’s like instant messaging, but optimized for groups. Especially great for remote teams.”

Gliffy
“With Gliffy online diagramming software, you can easily create professional-looking flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings,
and more!”

MindMeister
“MindMeister supports all the standard features of a classic mind mapping tool - only online, and with as many simultaneous users as you like!”

Helipad
“Write notes and organise them with tags; Create and maintain to-do lists; Draft documents on any device with Internet access; Quickly navigate with tags; Share your documents with friends [or co-workers]”

TrackMyPeople
TrackMyPeople allows you to easily track your time, as well as your employees time. Afterwards the online timesheet offers you and your employees flexible management and reporting options.

Paybackable
“Simple Online Expense Reports. Track out of pocket expenses; Calculate mileage expenses; Submit expense reports easily.”

BigContacts
“Web Based Contact Manager. Full featured: group calendar, tasks, email, files, photos, sales opporuntities. For organizations from 2 to 2,000 people.”

DeskAway
“Web Based Project Collaboration. Whether you are an individual or a small business, DeskAway helps you organize, manage and track your projects from a central location.”

88Miles
“88 Miles is all about making time tracking simple and quick. If you have ever spent the better part of your Friday afternoon trying to work out what you have been doing all week, you will love 88 Miles.”

myHours
“myHours.com is a time management, timesheet, time tracking solution. It enables you to track your work time, projects you work on and tasks you perform.”

WhoDoes
“WhoDoes 2.0 is the new version of the web-based application for the collaborative management of projects and coordination of the team.”

OnStage Project Portal
“OnStage is an online workspace, collaboration, and project management tool. It is a simple tool for complex needs.”

ProjectOffice.net
“Manage your project flow; Manage your time and expenses; Need to track issues? Share your knowledge through wikis!”

Joint Contact
“Joint Contact is a state-of-the art project collaboration tool for sharing and managing information that is used by business owners, project managers, freelancers and independent professionals. ”

Taskado
“Our Goal at Taskado is to make all projects easy to manage, and make your life easier in the process - because life is a project. Our philosophy is simple: project management is not about control, it’s about delegating and communicating.”

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This device plugins into the phone line and dials into the Presto service a few times a day, and prints out any received email. It uses a whitelist for screening email so you won’t get printouts from any spam or junk mail. Though it is a great idea, I have to wonder how long the Presto service has been around. The target audience for this device must be shrinking every day. Still, I applaud the concept.

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