Shanti’s Dispatches

Carlos Gabaldon has a slick way of handling plan/feature matrices in this article on Plans, Features and Ruby DSL.

The approach is to encapsulate various features like “can have 15 open projects”, etc. into a ‘features’ table which can house the feature name, etc.

This allows you to do things like:

if some_model.has_feature?(:can_send_foo)
  # send the foo
end

Nice!

That’s what Evan Williams said at the Future of Web Apps Summit last week in SF.

He was even going to go so far as to make it into a poster and hang it on the wall. Personally, I prefer this one from dispair.com:

p.s. sorry for not liveblogging the event more, like I said I would. luckily there are plenty of other sites out there w/ coverage.

Talking vs. Typing

I think that’s one of the things I like about working from home most of the time. You tend to spend a lot more time coding, than talking / debating and working out features.

Personally, I think it’s more productive to code 2-3 hours on something, trying out (in live code) as many different things as possible, than say, and hour or two of debate on the subject.

At least 50% of the time, it seems like you end up getting it wrong anyway, no matter how long you debated.

Of course, there’s always the danger of rogue coders going off the reservation and implementing stuff that is totally crazy or will never be used in live production. I think that’s OK — much like Google’s 20% time.

Gernally, programmers (or maybe it’s just my particular sensibility) would rather see things getting done, than endless debates, with no real forward progress. Hearing stories about Microsoft and their endless meetings and Powerpoint presentations, it sounds like they’ve fallen into the trap of Talking, Not Typing.

Astute readers will note the ironicalness of me blogging this instead of actually coding something right now. Ahem.

Tom Coates

- works for Yahoo
- rapid prototyping group in London
- MySpace: “eye-bleedingly horrible”
- alphabet & writing, the invention of money

Social Software
- an individual should get value from their contributions
- these contributions should provide value to their peers as well

Two types of social software
Consensus & Polyphony

Consensus: Digg & Wikipedia

Believes Polyphonic works much better:
Flickr, Hollywood Stock Exchange, last.fm

Only motivations in life:
- get laid & please jesus

Community motives
- anticipated reciprocity
- reputation
- sense of efficacy
- identification with a group

Random people edit wikipedia w/o ego boost or $$$

When people contribute to a group effort, they overestimate their total contribution (% wise) to the success of the whole.

Why people contribute to open source:
#1. Learning to code
#2. Gaining reputation
#3. Scratching an itch
#4. Contributing to the commons
#5. Sticking it to M$

Sharing without really knowing it
Sharing for personal use
Sharing with friends
Sharing with interest communities
Self-expression / showing off
Altruism / for the good of the world

Be wary of clumsy incentives like:
- money, points & competition

Types of people who engage in MUDs / MMORPGs
diamonds, spades, hearts, clubs

How to open up social value:
- expose every axis of data you can
- give people a place to represent themselves
- allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another

Be wary of creating a monoculture:
- digg and delicious/popular

Not all your users need to participate to generate social value

Where’s the money?
- attention and advertising
- premium accounts

Rise of aggregate data?
- proprietary data sources own a space
- they license their data initially selectively
- increasingly fluid and commodified services emerge with flat rate-card data provisions

Headed to San Francisco tonight for Carson Workshops’ Future of Web Apps Conference.

Special thanks to an old high-school pal David Rasch for hooking me up with a Refer a Friend discount. You da man!

If you’re going to be at the conference, feel free to drop me a line and we can say hello. I’ll be hanging with the Sprouts and David (CTO of Intellicontact).

They have a wiki setup here.

Hopefully I can liveblog some notes here if they have plenty of powerstrips on hand.

Oh gosh, YouTube now lets people customize their pages a la MySpace.

I loved YouTube’s clean interface. I wonder if their next step is to start making people click through and generate 3 page views before watching a video now.

Just testing to see if this works:

Via: Sudoku for your Website

Man, someone could make a killing if all they did was specialize in helping companies make their sites work (and look great) in all major (and minor) browsers. At least Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, to start with.

God help the web developer who has to make their complex web app work well and look great in even more obscure browsers like Camino, Konqueror and Opera.

It is the least enjoyable part of web development for me, though I’m sure once you’ve been doing just exactly that for long enough, it’s not nearly as painful of an experience.

The problem for most coders / web developers is that they might spend 60% on backend stuff and 40% on basic GUI / HTML code.

So if you bump into an obscure cross-browser quirk, chances are you’ve never seen it before or it’s been so long you forgot what the solution was.

Anyway, if you specialize in this kind of stuff, hit me up! I’d love to have a connection in this area.

Yes, Ruby does have poor UTF-8 support out of the box.

You might even call Internationalization implementations in Ruby / RoR “hacks”, though they do seem to work quite well by the time the bits get down to the end-user.

I don’t have firsthand experience in doing an RoR internationalization, but it appears that many of the underlying implementation details can be hidden off out of view in your vendor/plugins directory by using the Globalize plugin for Rails.

Ahhh, the beauty of Ruby! It’s shortcomings in one area are made up for by its elegance in other areas.

Shopify Goes International

RoR-powered Shopify now has checkout in multiple languages, even Scottish!

Robby Russell of Planet Argon responds in the comments as well:

i18n in Ruby on Rails isn’t really that difficult to do. At PLANET ARGON, we have done a few projects that supported multiple languages. The last one that we did supported the following languages:

ENGLISH, ČESKY, DEUTCH, ESPAÑOL (ESPAÑA), ESPAÑOL LATINO, FRANÇAIS, ITALIANO, MAGYAR, POLSKI, PORTUGUÊS (BRASIL), PORTUGUÊS (PORTUGAL), � УССКИЙ, TÜRKÇE, � าษาไทย, 简体中文
, 繁體中文, 日本語, and 한국어.

We used the Globalize plugin for this.

There you have it.

Via: Riding Rails

Tim Bray reports that Sun is hiring the JRuby guys.

Congrats to Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo (the JRuby guys)!

Heh, this article is great.

Back a few years ago I was briefly working on a project where you could list all of your books, DVDs, CDs, electronics, etc. etc.

Then review / rate / recommend them to friends. I explained the idea to my dad, and the first thing he said was, “Oh, so people can use it to find the best people to rob.”

It’s funny the things (usually nefarious) that you never really think about when you’re building a product.