Celebrating a Decade of Growth

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2011-02-24 00:00:00 UTC

In the next few months InfoEther will reach the major milestone of being 10 years old!

Rich and I formed the company at the one of the worst times possible, during the Web 1.0 Dot-Com crash. Our attempts at raising funding hit a similar wall that year, 2001, when everyone went to ground in the uncertainty following the September 11th attacks.

We planned to be a product company but we were able to "pivot" (using the latest overwrought term) to a software development consultancy and became a subcontractor on a major DARPA project. We expanded on the relatively modest role originally given to us and used Ruby in what we believed to be the first commercially paid use of the language in the US, when we developed a massive testing infrastructure with it. That was in 2002.

During this same period Rich and Chad, an independent consultant at the time, along with Dave Thomas, were involved in building the non-profit Ruby Central into the major force pushing the Ruby language to a broader community, producing the largest Ruby conferences, and later the largest Ruby on Rails conferences. Both annual conferences saw spectacular growth as the language (Ruby) and the Web framework (Rails) spread to a large and innovative developer community worldwide.

In 2005-2006 we raised seed funding, including our own self-investment, and shifted back to our goal of building innovative software products. We ended up creating products that were way ahead of the market and the infrastructure in 2006. That fact, and a challenging funding environment, had us "pivot" again to a consultancy where we used the expertise we gained in our product development to capture millions of dollars in software development work - building products for others.

That timing was fortuitous because Rails was just beginning to really take off. We steadily built up our client base and have performed work and training for well over 40 clients, almost all commercial, since 2007.

We doubled nearly every year with the exception of the post-2008 financial market crash, but even that didn't slow us down for long. It turned out the larger corporate world was discovering the cost and speed advantages of using open source technology and Ruby and Rails skills became very valuable and highly sought. Our reputation, thanks to the exposure of our exceptional people in the Ruby/Rails community worldwide, drew projects to us.

We thank our team for helping us build a great company, and would like to thank those that have made the Ruby and Rails community such a vibrant place which has helped us achieve a decade of growth in an exciting and ever evolving environment.

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SCNA 2010: Software Craftsmanship North America

Posted by Chad Fowler on 2010-10-19 00:00:00 UTC

This past weekend I attended and spoke at the second installment of Software Craftsmanship North America. The conference was organized by 8th Light and Obtiva and featured a variety of sessions on the topic of craftsmanship and excellence in our profession.

Overall, the conference was fabulous. It was well organized, well catered and well programmed. I left with a renewed excitement over the practice of programming.

My presentation was called "McDonalds, Six Sigma, and Offshore Outsourcing - Unexpected Sources of Insight". Here's the abstract:

We software developers like to think of what we do as an art form (or a craft, if you're at this conference). I was once asked to come up with a set of guidelines for creating great software so our (huge) company could more effectively use an offshore development team that had been delivering amorphous piles of crummy, nonworking code. I was frustrated and responded with something like this: "Give me a list of guidelines for how to make a beautiful song!" The nerve! Repeatable processes? Who did she think she was talking to?! This is a creative process! This is ART!!!!

I've since grown up a bit and I'd like to talk about how I was wrong and how we can all hopefully learn from my mistakes.

In it, I told the story of my experiences with the Six Sigma quality methodology and with offshore outsourcing, urging developers not to blindly write off potentially useful software development strategies based on hearsay and misunderstanding. I also proposed a customer-driven, data-driven approach to software engineering, dovetailing off of our own Chief Scientist, Glenn Vanderburg's recent ruminations on "Real Software Engineering".

Videos from SCNA will be posted on InfoQ eventually, and we'll link mine here when that happens. In the mean time, many people asked me for pointers to some of the books and resources I mentioned during my presentation. Here's a link dump that you might find useful:

• Wilson Pickett's Mustang Sally
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
• VMG BPO - Offshore business outsourcing
• Ask Sunday - Virtual Personal Assistants
• Low cost offshore IT outsourcing
• Quality Function Deployment
• iSixSigma - Lots of six sigma info
• DMADV - the six sigma design process in a nutshell
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Forbes article on Ray Kroc and the founding of the McDonalds chains
• John Zorn - Avant Garde saxophonist
• Paul Smith - Fashion designer
• Mark Rothko - Abstract Expressionist painter
• Rage comic generator
• Ugly Kitty Server code by me and Anthony Burns
• Ugly Kitty Server in action
• The "I know it when I see it" Supreme Court case
• Ibn Al-Haytham - inventor of the scientific method
• TDD T-Shirts
• Extreme Programming flow chart
• Rich Dad - Poor Dad
• The Passionate Programmer - My book
• The 4-Hour Work Week
• The Mechanical Turk

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RailsConf 2010 Wrap-up

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2010-07-21 00:00:00 UTC

The fifth Rails Conference was also the first one done on the East Coast, in this case in Baltimore. With over 1,300 attendees, this was one of the larger RailsConfs and was notable for the quality of keynotes which are available online now at http://en.oreilly.com/rails2010/public/schedule/proceedings

This marked the first time InfoEther promoted itself at a booth during the exhibition portion of the event. We introduced both our Rails Appliance product (which we call "INDI") and also promoted our software development consultancy.

The graphic here is the poster we used where we did a mock-up of an original Casablanca movie poster but with our people. We had some fun with this but the point was not to stroke our egos but to associate our people, some of which are very well known in the community, with InfoEther - a relationship many in the Ruby/Rails community did not know.

You can see presentations of our people online as follows:

Glenn Vanderburg - Real Software Engineering

John Athayde - Curing DIV-ITIS with Semantic HTML, CSS and Presenters

In addition, it was announced that RubyConf 2010 will be held in New Orleans this year in November. We'll be there as well. Make sure you check it out at http://rubyconf.org/

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Glenn Vanderburg Joins InfoEther as Chief Scientist

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2010-05-17 00:00:00 UTC

We are pleased to announce that today Glenn Vanderburg is joining our ever expanding team.

Glenn is well-known in the Ruby and Enterprise Software communities and has been a speaker at a wide variety of industry conferences over the past 10 years, presenting on topics ranging from Java and XML to Ruby, Rails, agile methods and functional programming.

As an expert in agile development practices, part of Glenn's new role is to take our consulting practice to the next level. He will also be responsible for leading some of the major projects being created around our new Rails "appliance" product which we will preview at the upcoming RailsConf in Baltimore.

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InfoEther Signs Up as Silver Sponsor at RailsConf 2010

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2010-05-10 00:00:00 UTC

InfoEther is taking the plunge. For the first time we will sponsor and exhibit at a major Rails event - RailsConf 2010

Our display will highlight our consulting practice and we will also be previewing our new Rails "appliance" product in the exhibit area on Tuesday and Wednesday during the event in Baltimore.

Rich and Chad will also be making a related presentation "My Own Private Cloud: Making Rails Deployment Suck Less without Outsourcing Your Infrastructure".

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Bruce Williams Joins InfoEther

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2010-04-05 00:00:00 UTC

Today we are happy to announce that well-known Rubyist Bruce Williams is joining our team!

Bruce will be based in Portland, Oregon where he lives and will be contributing to the many Rails-focused projects we have in the works.

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Chad Fowler's Podcast Interview - Becoming a Better Developer, Part 2

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2010-03-30 00:00:00 UTC

RC 14 - Chad Fowler Interview Part 2

This link is to a podcast conducted by Charles Max Wood. In this part of the interview Chad discusses how he broke out of a comfortable job as a forklift operator, which ultimately led him to becoming a programmer. He also discusses how to get involved in a software community and how to avoid burnout while maintaining your passion for programming.

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Happy New Year: InfoEther Moves!

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC

We have moved our office to a dedicated suite in Reston, a few miles east of our former location. Our new office is located in a building that was a big deal back in the Web 1.0/Dot-Com boom days in our area. It is now a regular office building but retains the many features from those days. Check it out on the building's own web site.

This facility will allow us to conduct small conferences and dedicated training classes on site as well as allow our clients to join us in working on projects with plenty of space for team rooms and collaboration.

Our new address can be found on the "Contact" page.

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RubyConf 2009 - San Francisco

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-11-21 00:00:00 UTC

The ninth annual Ruby Conference was held for the first time in the Bay Area this week and was oversubscribed. Originally we expected the attendance would be scaled back due to the economic times but were surprised when things significantly picked up at the last minute and we had to turn back potential attendees because the Embassy Suites venue did not have the capacity.

What was particularly noticeable was the number of people looking for Ruby and Rails developers. The job board was packed with ads from big companies as well as start-ups.

New to this event was the first 5K run which drew almost 20% of the attendees as participants. It was a great run along the waterfront course near the hotel. Planners are already expecting to have both a 5K and a 10K at the upcoming RailsConf 2010 which will be held in the historic Inner Harbor area in Baltimore in June .

Presentations for RubyConf 2009 can be found online at Confreaks.

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Ruby and Rails Ecosystem White Paper Available!

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-10-20 00:00:00 UTC

Click on the white paper "badge" on any page on our site or go to http://infoether.com/RubyRailsEcosystemFall2009.pdf to download this 7MB PDF.

This paper was a project that has gone on for almost a year. As you'll note from the download page discussion, the idea behind this document came from a major VC firm that wanted a chart of the ecosystem of companies and individuals that has grown up around the Ruby language and the Rails development framework.

To our knowledge, this is the first time someone has tried to map out the ecosystem around a software language and its frameworks. At least it is the first time someone tried to do it without charging for it.

While I was the author of most of the text, the input came from a vast number of sources and individuals. If you are a member of the Ruby/Rails community, we could not get to everyone and if we did not talk to you personally we tried to gather as much information as was available publicly. Remember, we had to do this in and around our day job of running a consultancy and product development company.

In a few cases, some of the ideas built upon were suggested by one or more thought leaders in the community on their blogs. We did not have time or space to make this a lengthy term paper with in-depth attribution pages, so if you see an idea in the paper that you may have discussed on your blog, we try to note that it came from a community discussion -- and thank you here for the effort in expressing it.

Since we are going to continually update this document, we would appreciate all feedback. Remember though that the audience for the paper is not a technical one. A real effort was made to appeal to the investor and business newcomer -- people who are looking to find an advantage and to understand what the big deal is all about behind Ruby and Rails.

We want to promote and celebrate the Ruby and Rails Ecosystem and all those within it.

Enjoy!

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Keynoting at Rails Summit - Latin America (Brazil!)

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-10-17 00:00:00 UTC

Chad opened the event on October 13th with a keynote on the "Rails Insurgency."  A link to the full one-hour video of the talk can be seen at: agaelebe.blip.tv/file/2726795/

Rich's keynote opened the second day of the event.  He spoke on MacRuby and HotCocoa.  

With 550 attendees, this is the second largest international conference for Ruby on Rails after the main RailsConf.  That is surprising considering that most of the attendees were from Brazil where most developers work for large enterprises and not technology start-ups. 

All the reports indicate this was an amazingly successful event.

Here are some links and photos:

Conference site (English version):  www.railssummit.com.br/en/pages/home

Full photo spread on Flickr:  Rails Summit 2009 - a set on Flickr

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Aloha on Rails

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-10-07 00:00:00 UTC

The first ever Rails conference in Hawai'i was held on October 4-6 in Honolulu at the Marriott Waikiki. Chad was the inaugural keynote speaker to kcik off the event where he spoke on "The Passionate Programmer". It turns out there is a surprisingly large population of Ruby and Rails developers living and working in Hawai'i. Who knew? Another proof point that Ruby and Rails has passionate communities across the globe. The conference site is www.alohaonrails.com.

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The rubyforge gem and the RubyForge REST API

Posted by Tom Copeland on 2009-09-22 00:00:00 UTC

Originally published on Tom's Blog at tomecopeland.blogs.com

Yesterday Ryan Davis and I released v2.0.0 of the "rubyforge" gem. The big change for this version is that it no longer interacts with RubyForge by scraping HTML; instead, it uses the new RubyForge REST API. So instead of POST'ing a form to login and fetch your project list, it uses HTTP Basic authentication and hits /users/zenspider/groups.js.

If you're using the new gem, you may see this when you run rubyforge config:

$ rubyforge config
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/json-1.1.7/lib/json/common.rb:122:in `parse': 
618: unexpected token at '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> (JSON::ParserError)
<!DOCTYPE html
[ ... lots more ... ]

That's happening because your ~/.rubyforge/user-config.yml file is telling the rubyforge gem to hit https://rubyforge.org, and it needs to hit http://api.rubyforge.org instead. To fix that, either run rubyforge setup, or just edit your ~/.rubyforge/user-config.yml and change the uri setting.

I'm happy to have a REST API for RubyForge available; this has been in the works for a few months and I hope folks come up with some interesting ways to use it. It's certainly much easier (and much more efficient) than the old way of using Mechanize or whatever to parse the HTML. Not all the RubyForge resources are available yet, so if you want to access something and don't see it in the API please let me know and I'll add it. The code is here and feedback is of course welcome. Enjoy!

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O'Reilly Webcast - "Radical Career Success in a Down Economy"

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-07-21 00:00:00 UTC

Chad Fowler gave his WebCast along with Andy Lester on July 1st. You can listen to it online at O'Reilly's website.

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Things I mentioned in my Ruby Nation presentation

Posted by Chad Fowler on 2009-06-15 00:00:00 UTC

Photos by Dave Bock

My Book

Bureau of Labor Statistics Time Use Survey

Stockholm Syndrome

Karlheinz Stockhausen whose name I accidentally used when trying to refer to Stockholm Syndrome.

4d Database

John Coltrane

da Vinci Sketches

Eight Hour Burn

XP (Agile) Immersion

Pat Metheny – “Whenever young guys ask me what they should do to get better, I always say try to be the worst guy in whatever band you’re in. That’s the secret.”

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Purple Cow

4-Hour Work Week

Wozzeck by Alban Berg

Drepung Gomang Institute (for whom we translated Hindi)

What Would You Rather Be Doing?

Ask Sunday – the company I mentioned that helped me with research

My exercise bike

Arduino – I used this to create the interface to my exercise bike

Gosu – The game library I used to write my exercise bike “game”

Building Games with Ruby – Andrea O.K. Wright’s presentation on game development in Ruby

You and Your Research – Richard Hamming at Bell Labs

Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order And Reducing Crime In Our Communities

The Pragmatic Programmer

Discussion Panel: Women in Rails

14 Worst Health Mistakes Even Smart Women Make – Referenced Harvard and University of Texas studies on the effect of the company you keep

How to Call Attention to Your Music – Derek Sivers free ebook

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will

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HotCocoa at CVRUG

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-06-12 00:00:00 UTC

Yesterday Rich spoke on HotCocoa at the Central Virginia Ruby Users Group (CVRUG) in Richmond, Virginia to a small but dedicated Rubyists that braved a severe thunderstorm to come to the meeting. Updates on the progress of MacRuby at Apple and code examples of hot HotCocoa works were presented. Though this talk is a variant of previous one given by Rich in Amsterdam and elsewhere, the discussions always turn out differently and reflect the keen interest in using MacRuby and HotCocoa.

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Updating the PassengerMemLimit Patch

Posted by Tom Copeland on 2009-06-05 00:00:00 UTC

A few months back schmalowsky (not sure of real name) posted to the Passenger issue tracker about a patch to limit Passenger memory usage. It's kind of a brutal patch in that it uses setrlimit, so if the process tries to allocate too much memory it just dies. But hey, it keeps one Passenger process from gobbling up all the memory on the box, and you don't need Monit to watch it, so, good enough.

That said, the patch is a few months old and the Passenger source code has moved around, so the patch no longer applies cleanly. I've brought it up to date and you can get the diff here. It seems to work fine - when I set it low enough the process gets put down as soon as it exceeds the threshold.

To try this patch out, do something like this:

git clone git://github.com/FooBarWidget/passenger.git
cd passenger
wget http://infoether.com/~tom/passenger_memlimit.diff
git apply passenger_memlimit.diff
rake package:gem
sudo gem install pkg/passenger-2.2.2.gem --no-rdoc --no-ri
sudo /usr/local/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module --auto
# now edit your httpd.conf and add "PassengerMemLimit 192M"
/sbin/service httpd configtest
sudo /sbin/service httpd restart

I fiddled with this patch for quite a while on my Macbook - but setrlimit(RLIMIT_RSS, nnn) doesn't seem to be taking effect. The function call is returning 0, and a subsequent getrlimit returns the value that I just set, but the process size grows and grows regardless. Not sure what's up with that. This is on OS X 10.5.7, Darwin Kernel Version 9.7.0. If anyone has insights into that please send them my way, thanks! Update: Eric Hodel tweets "setrlimit wasn't fully implemented on OS X, RSS and others are missing." Thanks Eric!

Also, mad props to schmalowsky for writing the original code. All I did was juggle it around a bit; the real work was already done. And of course a huge thanks as always to the Phusion guys for Passenger!

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Rich Speaks at Ruby on OS X in Amsterdam

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-05-14 00:00:00 UTC

Photos by Thijs van der Vossen (via Creative Commons)

This Mac developer conference held in The Netherlands was the second venue where Rich Kilmer spoke on HotCocoa. HotCocoa is a thin Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks that simplifies the verbose OS X API so that a programmer can construct user interfaces without Interface Builder. It is accomplished by creating a mapping layer on top of the Objective-C classes and adds Ruby-friendly methods, constants and delegate techniques that are refreshingly simple but do not prevent full access to the Cocoa APIs.

Rich's talk focused on the state of the project and its future direction as well as giving a demo on its usability.

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RailsConf 2009 - A Good Time in Vegas

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-05-10 00:00:00 UTC

First three photos by James Duncan Davidson. Fourth photo by John Athayde

The fourth annual Ruby on Rails conference concluded last week and was a success despite the dreary economy. The final tally of registered attendees came in at 1,300 which was down slightly from the high last year but still made it the second largest of the four conferences. Chad and Rich were the conference co-chairs.

The big topic/theme of the event was the "coming soon" Rails 3.0 which will incorporate the many ideas of the Merb framework that is being merged into it. The new Rails core team of developers ended the event with a Q&A.

The presentations and other links from the event are listed below.

One very important item that came out of the conference was the confirmation that Rails is being used in the Enterprise in a big way. Over a third of the attendees indicated that they worked in large enterprises on Rails projects. Another third of the audience were consultants that split their time between Enterprises and start-ups (The other third were all from start-ups). If that straw poll is correct, that means about half of all the Rails work being done is being done under the radar at companies to solve major business problems internally or to create new web-based corporate products. If this is indeed true, as many of us in the Rails consulting community believe it is, Rails has crossed a major threshold that will help its growth and success. This tied nicely to the theme of one of the keynote presenters, Robert Martin, who explained why Smalltalk failed. The main reason, in his opinion, was that it was not applied to solve real (and boring) business problems. It was not allowed to get its hands dirty. For that reason Ruby and Rails probably have already escaped the Smalltalk curse.

Official Site: http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/
Official photo gallery by James Duncan Davidson
Videos of presentations
RailsEnvy "RailsConf 2009 in 34 Minutes" Video

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MacRuby Presentation Kills at GoGaRuCo 09

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-04-20 00:00:00 UTC

Rich Kilmer blew the socks off the audience at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in San Francisco - based on the accumulated Twitter traffic by the geeks in attendance. As the lead off speaker, Rich gave the 200 or so assembled developers a look at the history and progress of MacRuby and HotCocoa.

Here are the links to the slides and an enthusiastic blog post by Edward Hieatt which can provide more insight.

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The Passionate Programmer

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-04-15 00:00:00 UTC

We are pleased to announce today that our own Chad Fowler has released his new book, The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. A podcast about the book is also available online: http://podcasts.pragprog.com/2009-04/chad-fowler-on-the-passionate-programmer.mp3

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New MacRuby Site

Posted by John Athayde on 2009-04-03 00:00:00 UTC

The new MacRuby website is alive and kicking with a new look and feel (courtesy of me) and a nice Webby-based backend (courtesy of Rich Kilmer).

Webby is a Ruby framework that allows the user to work with model files to build a static site. We have a lot of helper methods and ERB that ends up dumped out as HTML when we run the deploy command. It's similar to WordPress in that way, and it is a phenomenal tool for building static sites that feel dynamic. While it does support things such as HAML and SASS, we relied on good old Textile to get the job done.

The site is run without a database. It uses @structs@ and helper methods to generate everything. For example, if Rich wanted to add someone to the "Project Team" list, he would simply update the Ruby array of people objects and the helpers loop through and make it all nice and styled. There was more info presented on this page initially, being the name, URL, focus and company affiliation, but it was simplified down for some of the presenters. The Special Thanks are handled in the same way.

We've been very happy to see some of the recent press about MacRuby as well. If you haven't seen it, please check out:

Upcoming MacRuby Implementation to be Substantially Faster (at ArsTechnica)

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Charity at Scotland on Rails

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-03-30 00:00:00 UTC

Chad Fowler donated his talents to give an all-day tutorial for charity along with Marcel Molina just prior to the opening of the Scotland on Rails conference (March 26 - 28,2009), which raised funds for the Children's Hospice Association of Scotland. The tutorial entitled "The Secret Ingredients of Ruby" gave an introduction to Ruby's more advanced features. They raised £ 7,000 (pounds sterling) for the charity. Of note was the fact that the 70 attendees was actually larger than the number of attendees that came to RubyConf 2004 - just five years ago!

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Chad at RubyRX

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2009-03-02 00:00:00 UTC

Last month, our CTO spoke at the first edition of RubyRx, a new series for the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour. The two day event, held in Raleigh, NC, catered to an east-coast crowd of about 60 developers covering topics as diverse as Erlang and Clojure. Chad introduced attendees to what's changed in Ruby 1.9 and demystified ActiveRecord by walking through some of the more interesting parts of its internals. Keep an eye on the No Fluff Just Stuff web site for future editions of RubyRx.

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Your Customers Aren't Idiots

Posted by Chad Fowler on 2008-12-05 00:00:00 UTC

I was in a customer conference call with John Athayde recently, and he did something really smart. He was talking about his in-progress design for the customer's product and he wanted to explain that we would have reusable snippets of the design which would allow us to consistently provide the same view of an important part of the system whenever it would show up. This being a Rails project, we would do this using ERb partials.

So, John said, "We will extract this out into little snippets that I'll call -- partials". And so on.

He could have made up a metaphor and used a new customer-friendly term for this. Or he could have explained that we're using Rails, and Rails supports this thing called "partials" which is... blah blah blah. But the former requires us to learn a dumb new word just for this project, and the latter is too much information. The term "partial" is a pretty good one to describe what it does. In fact, in most well-designed systems, the terms the system uses to describe concepts are pretty good. Pretty easy to understand.

For some reason we developers feel compelled to hide these terms and concepts from our customers as if they're children that can't be trusted with sharp tools. They're not idiots. They just know different things than we do. Imagine if they tried to hide their terms and concepts from you because they assumed you were unable to understand them.

I saw Martin Fowler speak at an XP users' meeting several years ago, and when he got to the practice called "system metaphor", he said he didn't really do that practice so much anymore because (paraphrased from iffy memory), "Sometimes the best metaphor for a system is the system itself". Note to self- keep that in mind more often.

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Shenandoah Ruby Users Group Presentation

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-09-30 00:00:00 UTC

Marcel Molina and Rich Kilmer gave talks at ShRUG in the university town of Harrisonburg, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley on the beauty of code and the Q&A session was recorded and posted online in a video file.

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Chad Fowler Pragmatic Programmers Podcast, "Finding the Jagged Edges"

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-08-20 00:00:00 UTC

Daniel Steinberg of the Programmatic Programmers ( http://pragprog.com/ ) interviews Chad on a wide range of topics including programming, music, math, the C64, Ruby, Rails, electronics, hooking up the real world to the computer, the Principle of Agreement, the dangers of stagnation, invigorating your career and globalization. Listen to the podcast

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RubyKaigi

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-06-20 00:00:00 UTC

Our guys supported the 3rd annual Japanese Ruby event known as RubyKaigi, held just north of Tokyo beginning today. They were on panels and provided their insight to the Japanese developers attending this event. "Kaigi" means "meeting" or "conference" in Japanese.

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RailsConf 2008

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-06-01 00:00:00 UTC

The third annual Ruby on Rails conference ended today (RailsConf 2008 - O'Reilly Conferences, May 29 - June 01, 2008,Portland, Oregon). Our CTO, Chad Fowler served as conference chair and co-host along with Rich Kilmer. Chad told the audience that this conference did not sell out. What he was really saying was that the decision was made to accommodate as many attendees as possible. In point of fact, over 2,000 developers attended, a 25% increase over the previous year where attendance was capped at 1,600.

Chad noted that the conference committee had over 300 talk submissions from which they had to select only a handful for the available speaking slots during the three days of the event. Compare this to the fact the first Ruby Conference in 2001 only had 30 people attend. There were 10x the number of topics submitted as there were attendees only 7 years ago.

There were a lot of talks and releases of note but the two that stood out were the Mod_Rails and Maglev presentations. Mod_Rails (Overview — Phusion Passenger™ (a.k.a. mod_rails)), now officially called Phusion Passenger dramatically simplifies the deployment of Rails apps. Maglev from GemStone (MagLev - Ruby that scales) promised dramatic speed changes for Ruby deployments that can scale.

Our own Tom Copeland, who administers the RubyForge (RubyForge: Welcome) site on the side, received one of the six new "Ruby Heroes" awards at the conference. With Rich's help, Tom was able to accept the honor via IM.

Here are some shots from the conference.

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Chad Fowler Speaks at the International DB2 Users Group Conference

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-05-21 00:00:00 UTC

Our CTO gave one of the keynote presentations at this conference in Dallas this week with the topic, "Fight the Traffic: Radical Success Versus Fear of Failure in the World of Global Software Engineering". The program is available online.

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Keynoting in Poland at the Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny (or SFI 2008)

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-03-08 00:00:00 UTC

Chad Fowler gave a keynote at this conference that brought together some of the smartest programmers in Eastern Europe. He had been invited specifically to speak about the worldwide impact Ruby is having on software development and business.

Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny 2008

See the shots on Flickr

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Site Update February 08

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-02-14 00:00:00 UTC

We have consolidated our two sites, INFOETHER.COM and GETINDI.COM. The indi Beta will not be available again until the Spring when we will separate out the GETINDI site again for those that are invited to the next version of the Beta.

The current site redo now highlights our Ruby and Rails consulting practice which has really taken off in 2008. Apparently Rails has “crossed the chasm” into widespread acceptability and the interest has been significant. In one of our client engagements we replaced a non-working Java application that took 18 months and 10 people to create with a Rails implementation that worked and only took us 6 weeks with 3 people. Granted our people are very good, but this is just one of many illustrations of the power of Ruby and Rails.

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Social Graph Foo Camp 2008

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2008-02-05 00:00:00 UTC

Rich Kilmer was among about 70 Friends Of O'Reilly to attend the first ever Foo Camp (http://sgfoocamp08.pbwiki.com/FrontPage) to explore the so-called “Social Graph”. This event was interesting because it was a vertical Foo Camp, had fewer attendees and relied more on demos of work being done than on general open topic sessions.

Some of the best known people doing the actual coding work in this area were there from the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo and others. Big topics of interest were the recent movements in OpenSocial, OAuth, data portability and the MySpace API.

The 800-pound gorilla in room was privacy - not security of data placed by people on these Web servers run by the social networks - but the control over what an individual can do with information they post.

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RubyConf 2007

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2007-11-01 00:00:00 UTC

The annual Ruby Conference will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina over this coming weekend, November 2-4. Check out the agenda at http://rubyconf.org/agenda.html. Rich and Chad will be acting as the MC's for the event as in the past.

Of note will be presentations by our own Marcel Molina on "What Makes Code Beautiful" and by Jay Phillips on "Next-Gen VoIP Development with Ruby and Adhearsion".

We have been working recently with Jay on his Adhearsion platform and are enthusiastic about the possibilities of integrating with VoIP applications.

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JAOO Conference 2007

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2007-09-24 00:00:00 UTC

Rich Kilmer and Chad Fowler spoke at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark. JAOO (http://jaoo.dk/) is the premier developer conference on software technology, methods and best practices.

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RailsConf Europe 2007

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2007-09-17 00:00:00 UTC

Rich Kilmer and Chad Fowler spoke at the Ruby on Rails conference held in Berlin, Germany this week. Both Rich and Chad are founders and board members, along with David Alan Black, of Ruby Central (http://www.rubycentral.org), the non-profit organization that supports the Ruby programming language with activities such as conferences and the operation of the open-source project site, RubyForge (http://www.rubyforge.org). This conference is done with cooperation with O'Reilly Media.

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Rich Kilmer Online Interview

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2007-06-26 00:00:00 UTC

Rich, the co-founder and CEO of InfoEther, gives a technical interview on developing in Ruby and discusses the Beta release of indi during the International Ruby Conference a few months ago. This video-cast interview appears on the InfoQ site, which is for enterprise software developers.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/rich-kilmer-power-of-ruby

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FooCamp - 2007

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2007-06-18 00:00:00 UTC

InfoEther's CEO, Rich Kilmer and CTO, Chad Fowler were invited to attend the annual Foo Camp hacker event hosted by publisher O'Reilly Media.

Foo Camp has evolved into an important event for “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators”. Foo Camp attendance is usually limited to 200-300. Rich, fortunately, has been invited to every annual Foo Camp event since 2003.

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Chad Fowler Joins InfoEther as CTO

Posted by Mark Gardner on 2007-06-15 00:00:00 UTC

Chad is well known in the Ruby development community as he co-founded RubyCentral along with Rich and David Alan Black in 2001 to evangelize and promote the Ruby language.

As part of that effort the founders of RubyCentral serve as the organizers and hosts for all the major Ruby events including the annual Ruby Conference and several Rails conferences held in cooperation with O'Reilly Media in both the U.S. and Europe.

Chad has published several books on Ruby and other topics and is also known for his training classes that are held in cooperation with The Pragmatic Studio.

Welcome aboard!

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