I think in the year 2009 we’ve seen the group grow from a meeting of somewhere around 4-8 people each month to sometimes around 30. In December to celebrate a successful year of growth in the Perth Ruby community we went on a pub crawl down Barrack and Beaufort St, everyone seemed to have a lot of fun and it was good to take the show on the road. Generally we keep the drinking and tomfoolery inside the bounds of our office.

You can find out some more information at the meetup site but generally we get between 15 to 30 people attending and there will be talks ranging from using Capistrano for PHP deployments to Behaviour Driven Testing and a lot in between. In January we had talks on using Sinatra to setup some simple Javascript unit testing, using Sinatra and Rake to setup a simple management interface, and using Soap4R to interface with SOAP APIs.

The meetup is held in Unit 9, 1010 Wellington St from 5pm onwards. Beers and snack food are provided, you just need to bring yourself and a willingness to exchange ideas! The next meeting will be on February 18, 2010.

The instant it was announced, the concept of jumping on the nearest spaceship and leaving this planet behind was not far from my mind. I mean, who doesn’t love a good argument on the Internet right? But the sheer magnitude of negativity and lack of foresight was astounding. I guess there was a lot of disappointed people who expected the iPad to be something that it was never intended to be, but are we really living in an “all about me” society? More importantly, is that where we want to be?

I would never expect everyone to like such a device and nearly everyone I talk to that doesn’t use an Apple product, hates Apple products. I used to be one of those people too. I grew up with MS-DOS, Windows 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000, XP, then shifted to Linux for the next few years. Maybe a solid Apple product came along at the right time for me, just as all the other competitors were struggling. They’ve since moved on and regained their following again, but I’ll most likely continue down the path which has seen me the most productive in business and life.

But back to my original point. I spent 10 minutes thinking about potential uses for the iPad that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere, and it wasn’t hard to come up with some amazing out of the box solutions. I contemplated writing a post, to join the other millions of bloggers out there but I held back for a while. Eventually Venessa Miemis wrote exactly what I was thinking, but she’s done the hard work citing resources and everything!

If you have a spare ten minutes it’s definitely worth a read, regardless of how you feel about the device. It may turn out to be a game-changer or it may disappear into insignificance 12 months after it launches. But if like me, people want to read some objectivity on a topic, then this is for you.

iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?

We look forward to working with Engine Yard and are excited at the opportunities it will bring in 2010.

Oh, and we get to display a sexy badge :)

From prnewswire:

With the dramatic increase in the number of Ruby on Rails development firms, Engine Yard has launched the Engine Yard Partner Network to connect customers to a full range of application services for Ruby on Rails including design, development, deployment, and maintenance. Choosing an Engine Yard Partner with Engine Yard products and services helps deliver a highly available, scalable, secure application and a seamless end-to-end experience.

“The ecosystem of application development firms using Ruby on Rails is snowballing as more and more firms discover they can get more done in less time by switching to Rails,” said Marcy Campbell, VP of Sales and Business Development of Engine Yard. “We’re excited to offer our partners a complete, reliable platform for their Rails applications during and after development.”

Partner Network developers create applications using Ruby on Rails because they can deliver better applications faster and with higher quality. They rely on Engine Yard to provide the best platform, technologies, and services to deploy and manage applications in the cloud.

Our development team has recently grown to eight staff and we’re looking to take on our first full time designer. Until now we’ve worked with design freelancers and subcontractors. Now we want to make a designer part of our team, allowing our developers to work closely with the interface expert. We need someone who’s part of our team and not just kicking the ball in the same direction.

Is this you?

We don’t micro-manage and we trust your design ability, so you’ll need to have a track record of delivering completed designs. You’ll have a few years commercial experience, probably working in a creative studio doing great but under-appreciated work.

This is your opportunity to jump-ship and drive the creative direction of a young, vibrant and passionate company.

You’ll care about pixel-perfect alignment, and will take pride in the quality of the HTML you use to reflect those designs. You’ll know how JavaScript can be used to enhance the web. You might even care about SASS and HAML, if you’re really cool.

You’ll keep up to date with current trends and care about using modern techniques and practices, as well as tools and technologies.

Your workload will be approximately broken down into:

• 50% web application
• 25% web site
• 25% other design

The other design component will include things like fashion (t-shirt design), art work and even interior design… anything colourful or creative that’s happening in our world will be your responsibility.

Using the right tools is important and we realise that. We don’t have a parent company dictating how we do things or what our “standard operating environment” is – you’ll get to make those decisions with us. We all use MacBook Pros for development, but you might want a new iMac, for example.

What we give you

• $76k per year salary
• 9% superannuation (on top of salary)
• $1k travel allowance per year (parking, bike servicing, public transport)
• Internet and mobile allowance ($80 each per month)
• Opportunities to work from home/flexi-time
• Private office (when we move to the new location mid-year, if preferred)
• Pay reviews every 6 months with no ceiling on earning potential

What you give us

• 38 hours per week
• Your creative genius

How to apply

Send an email to jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au linking to your online portfolio. Please be clear how much of the design you are responsible for, or if it was a collaborative process with other creative types.

Prepare a list of four sites – two that have elements you like, and two that have elements you dislike. A critique of these, either in person or via the phone, will be part of the second round of interviews.

Our growth until now has been very controlled and organic, in that we have always been reacting to our business’ needs. We have taken on development staff one at a time. This resulted in our team being stretched for a little while before we take on a new hire. For example, when we moved from two directors (and took on Mark, our first employee) it was because Adam and I were working at 150% capacity. When Mark joined us, and we could spread that 300% over three people. As we get bigger, the extra capacity a single person can supply is reduced, relative to the total capacity of the company. This is great because it means we don’t get pushed to 150% anymore, but also means we need to start taking on multiple hires at once.

Late last year we had James and Dan join us, and we’ve just wrapped up our interview process and have hired John, Jacques and Jordan. We’ve gone from five developers to seven, to ten.

Now we’re looking for a full-time designer too, to join our team and balance our logic and structure with creativity and colour.

This raises the following ethical consideration: is it OK to actively head-hunt staff from other organisations? What if they’re your competitors? What if they’re you competitors, but you’re part of a social community? I think there’s two main schools of thought.

Firstly, there’s the attitude that we live in a capitalist world where the dollar rules and everyone’s looking out for themselves. If you can offer better employment opportunities than your competitor, then that’s your commercial advantage. If The Frontier Group is able to offer a larger salary and greater career prospects than our competitors, it’s to our benefit. Is it unethical for us to leverage that advantage?

Counter-balancing that argument, I feel, is the idea that the relationship between a company and their employees is comparable to human romantic relationships. If the pretty girl at the bar has a ring on her finger, it’s not considered appropriate to hit on her. Do you thing that translates?

Are “married” (employed) staff off-limits, or is it a case of “all’s fair in love and war (and HR)”?

Sortfolio (the website formerly known as Haystack), is a website where web design firms (and freelancers) can provide the necessary information about their business to a potential client. Instant information such as location, price and style of work are easily found. Sortfolio makes it easy for a potential client to browse multiple web designers all at once and make an informed choice.

Whether this concept will prove to be effective long term is still an unknown. Certainly for companies in Australia it seems to be less effective at the moment. I would imagine that potential customers in Australia probably aren’t using this sort of website or directory, like our American counterparts would be.

We’ve had our free listing on there since the site launched in October and have had no enquiries in that time. Potentially the 11 hits to our website from Haystack last year were all internal.

The paid plan experiment

Sortfolio offers a paid plan for $99 per month. You have access to 6 thumbnails instead of 1, and a larger listing card. Given that there can be a large number of people competing for ad space, this can prove to be effective from a theoretical point of view. You can see the immediate benefit on the Perth-Australia page.

This benefit is less apparent when the search is refined, however there still is an advantage to being a large listing card.

Recently 37 Signals announced another benefit for paid listings. They purchased a slot on The Deck Network for Sortfolio. That gives somewhere between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 ad impressions in a 30 day period. They used to run a static ad in that spot, but now are splitting the ad display 25% static and 75% dynamic. The dynamic ads feature the Sortfolio Pro customers. About 140 companies have Pro listings and the ad is a combination of a crop of the thumbnail as well as linking to the Sortfolio listing.

This means we will also get roughly 15,000 highlighted ad impressions across The Deck Network. This means exposure to sites such as Daring Fireball, A List Apart, 43 Folders, Kottke.org, The Morning News, Ze Frank, Twitteriffic (in app), Tweetie (in app) & Design Observer.

It will be interesting to see over the next 2 months whether this proves to be effective for an Australian company, as well as it seems to be for our US counterparts. You can check out our full listing on Sortfolio and if you are an Australian company (or freelancer) who has had success with Sortfolio, please leave a comment.

Now most of our controllers require the user to be logged in so writing tests to check this for every controller is annoying and time consuming, more than that it feels dirty. I think this is what some people call a code smell though I’m not up to speed on buzz words. There are also other tasks that are done quite often such as setting up the various types of users we’d like to test as, it would be nice if this were easily put in one place and could be easily pulled in. I guess I was looking for a template of tests that I could share.

It seems that the solution to it is found in Shared Example Groups which I hadn’t heard very much discussion about and it kind of leaves working out how they work to you rather than documenting it too much.

So far I’ve used it simply to make sure that controllers that require are redirecting users appropriately and also for setting up a specific type of user for our system before testing.

I created a directory under /spec/support called example_groups and in there I have a file called login_groups.rb. In that file I have something like the following :

shared_examples_for "customer is logged in" do
  before(:all) do
    @user = Factory(:customer_user)
    @user.customers.push Factory(:customer)
  end

  before(:each) do
    activate_authlogic
    OperatorSession.create(@operator)
  end
end

Now in my spec files when I have a bunch of tests requiring a logged in customer I will include this little snippet :

  it_should_behave_like "customer is logged in"

I get a logged in customer to start playing around with. I have the spec/support/example_groups directory in my include paths for Rspec and so it just all works.

My tests can then start to look like :

describe MerchantsController do
  it_should_behave_like "areas requiring login"

  context "customer logged in" do
    it_should_behave_like "customer is logged in"

    ... insert other tests here ...
  end
end

It means I can swap in another authentication gem/plugin pretty easily and also encapsulates the logic about creating customers, or whatever type of item you want to use, so that if that changes you can swap things in and out with a minimum of fuss.

Just to be clear, example groups aren’t limited to setup tasks or connecting to before/after hooks, you can also include a bunch of tests as well. This allows me to have a bunch of tests to run to make sure that a user does have to be logged in for various controllers and include these tests in on line.

I hope this helps someone, it took a bit of searching and trial and error myself this morning to get it working and find the uses for it that I’ve found. I’m definitely open to better solutions to this sort of issue though.

The JRuby project has been growing impressively quickly, with frequent releases and a constantly expanding community. There’s a hefty list of impressive users and companies, and the team has been touring the world, trying their best to make it out to everyone who wants to hear and learn about the project.

As with any growing code base though, there’s a need to keep things tidy; frequent releases and speedy development also mean bugs, and things that need fixing—and that’s where we turn to you!

The first ever official JRuby BugMash will take place this Saturday, January 9th through Tuesday, January 12th. The core team will spend the days prior to the BugMash highlighting the specific bugs that are most important—you’ll want to keep an eye out for the JRuby Introsection, which will one of the focuses of the BugMash. Also look in spec/tags for failing RubySpecs for JRuby’s 1.8 and 1.9 compatibility modes. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit (especially in 1.9) for both new and experienced developers. Then, Saturday morning, it’s off to the races! As a small token of our appreciation, in addition to the wonderful satisfaction of having made a difference to the project, we’ll be sending each of the first 100 participants a limited edition JRubyConf Poster.

The JRuby Core Team will be around on IRC channel #jruby throughout the BugMash to help folks get started and to answer questions. Be sure to stop in and say hello!

There’s also a great post on the good and bad of JRuby over at the Engine Yard blog.

Certain industries and business niches really thrive with the inclusion of professional photography in a website design. Whether to convey to the customer or shareholder the true nature of the business, or to show professionalism, or perhaps to make something instantly recognisable to the website viewer.

We try to use professional photographs as much as possible where the client will allow it, as it can really bring a website to life.

An oldie but a goodie

This website for Caudo Group has been around for a few years now, but the inclusion of high quality photography (taken by one of our team members), really helps this design stand the test of time. We captured photographs of their brand new office at the time, and some of their equipment.

Supplied photography

These photographs really emphasize the nature of Helix Resources, and the industry they are involved in. These photographs were supplied by their team, but are still of a high enough quality to really bring the website to life. This website is about 18 months old now, but once again retains a fresh feel thanks to some high quality images.

When stock is best

Some websites and industries work better with stock photography. Either the service is disconnected from the place of business, or there might be no images to work with. For a professional feel that still reaches out to particular demographics, stock photography can be used to great effect. In the case of Ironmonger Financial it is used to connect with the website visitor to show them that the content they are reading is relevant to them.

As you can see, using high quality images in a design can really work wonders.

It’s certainly not the rule, however an attractive, professional website goes a long way to showing your customers the care and professionalism that you apply to the business. An integral part of how you represent yourself to clients, customers and the world at large!

A business missing out on this, or having a low quality website is positioning themselves behind the eight ball, giving their competitors an easy ride to market share.

A good example is browser upgrades. We all know it’s a worthwhile suggestion, and having the latest browser is the best option in most cases, but explaining that to a user or client can be difficult. It can be especially difficult if you don’t have face time with a user; the most common situation in the web environment.

Telling a user that the site works better in Firefox 3 or Safari 4 will, perhaps, just lead to the user finding a site that works better with their browser instead. It would be nice if we tried a different tact, and in doing so helped not only ourselves, but the wider community of developers. After all we want the same outcome : to have our work viewed the way we intended, for the minimum amount of work. Cross browser development sucks!

I was thinking the other day that I don’t think I’ve ever heard from a developer that users should switch browsers for security reasons, or any other reason the user would care about. Users don’t care about ACID compliance, or Javascript optimisations or any other technicalities. What they do care about though is security, especially now that mainstream operating systems, manufacturers and financal institutions have gotten the word out about phishing and other vulnerabilities.

• All the latest browsers support some form of malware protection and anti-phishing protection. This increases user security.
• All the latest browsers concentrate on process isolation and run time optimisations. This decreases crashes and increases browsing speed.
• All the latest browsers have been improving standards compliance. This increases the likelihood that more sites will work for the user.
• All the latest browsers manage their own update process. The user isn’t required to remember to stay up to date in the future.
• All the latest browsers have the latest patches and updates and latest features. This gives the user the most secure, fastest, and feature packed experience.

We all know that unless you have a very good reason, it’s silly to be running an old browser. However when was the last time you explained the benefits for them personally? Increased security, increased stability, increased speed, more compatibility with other sites and the latest features available.

If you find a better way to sell your clients on spending 5 minutes to upgrade their browser then make sure you spread the word. Every user you convert is a win for the web community and the internet in general!