I first heard about Ruby on 2008 at a summer university course from the Simplelogica guys, and also Rails with the famous video “Build a blog in 15 minutes”.

But I lost interest since I was comfortable making a living with PHP and only a few hosting services supported Ruby. Anyway I made some friends from Simplelogica like David Arango that has kept me aware of the Ruby scene through the years.

The fascination

On 2012 I gave it another try, but this time seriously. I co-founded an startup with a Ruby on Rails trainer, so he took me under his wing to become the second back-end developer.

I read some books, completed online tutorials, and a month later started working from scratch on the project. Learning about the scaffolding, the API, multitenancy… most of the time we did analysis & design, but the coding times where fun and finally got my attention over Ruby and its awesome environment and community.

But hard times came when the iOS developer left us, so in an effort to save the situation I set Ruby aside and tried to master Objective-C in 3 months to create the iPad app prototype. Some months later all felt apart and our adventure ended, sending me back to PHP just for the money.

The mature decision

So a month ago we moved from Albacete to Madrid, almost the same time that I turned a 10 years old PHP developer, and all become so obvious.

I’ve learnt almost 7 PHP frameworks, and I’ve been betrayed by almost all of them, most notably by PradoPHP (the precursor of Yii). And altought Laravel promise a great future, I’m really tired of the ecosystem, as I did just with 2 years on enterprise Java.

What now?

Almost all this past month I’ve been back to learn & practice Ruby, contributing to Madrid.rb website with a scrapping file for their old wiki, and completing a turbot at Civio’s #flashhack for OpenCorporates with @ferblape, and it was all really fun and increased my will to master the environment.

Well I’m not the first to walk this path, but neither will be the last, so just because it could be useful for someone, or to my own pleasure reading this 10 years in the future… I’ll write down My Ruby Way.

Netberry & PHP tiredness

During the year and half that we stayed in Albacete I got a job on Web & Mobile development at Netberry. It was a good place to work, with a nice family feeling among the co-workers, and made some great friends.

In my first project I built a web application that works entirely offline in the browser, so a technician working on a solar or eolic plant without connection could still use it. I’ll write about it soon… but basically used IndexedDB for the data, Javascript for the logic and Cache Manifest to let the files persist without internet.

Also improved a lot my jQuery and Javascript, learned about framework internals (we used a custom PHP framework built on top of Zend)), some custom scripts with PHPExcel and SEPA data format form bank domiciliations… worked on some cool and big projects, patched legacy code at others… Even got the opportunity to evangelize about Git, SublimeText and PhpStorm.

But definetly got tired of PHP and it’s environment after more than 10 years dealing with passing frameworks, customs CMS’s and Wordpress/Drupal/etc…

So whats next? Ruby!!

Since we are living in Madrid and there are plenty of job offers for diverse positions, I’ll finally give Ruby a solid chance to change my career and have fun again at work.

Many years has passed since I first tried it, and even got a good chance to work with RoR (although life got in the way)… but third time’s the charm, because this time I got everything on place.

I’m out of stock, and won’t be selling ZTE Open anymore.

You could search ZTE Open on ebay or take a look at the news about the lastest devices with FirefoxOS at FirefoxOSGuide.

This Monday I read about Movistar launching the ZTE Open, so I rushed to the nearest Movistar shop to ask when they will receive and how many units, but they didn’t even know what Firefox OS was about!.

I had to show them my GeeksPhone Keon and Peak and make a quick explanation about the origins and purpose of the new operative system and devices. They promised to call me when the devices arrived and I offered to give them a more extended talk anytime.

And this morning my Google Nexus rang with good news! they received only one unit and luckyly I was the first in line :).

Since I’ll be using it for development only, I chose the voice-only plan “Contrato 6” that costs 6€/month (the minimum spending) because WiFi will be enough.

Unboxing

As expected the device isn’t unlocked, but since the contract doesn’t have permanence obligations I was able to get the NCK code to unlock the device by calling the support number 1004, and now I can use it with my Pepephone simcard without problems.

It comes with a Movistar logo on it’s back and in a their brand blue color. Also they added a “Mi Movistar” app to access the client panel, and a Settings menu under ‘Operator Services’ to open the operator chat and email custom services.

The box remembers me of the Geeksphone Peak’s, although this one has better quality. The inside of the top comes with a cool Firefox OS logo.

The accesories seems to have worst quality than the Geeksphone ones, even the charger, but indestructibles anyway.

After basic configuration updates kicked in! The basic pack its enough for starters, although the game pack doesn’t fit my taste. In the list you can uncheck updates.

A quick comparation with the GeeksPhone Keon & Peak models.

My Google Nexus feeling his future death.

Testing

To test the microphone and video recording indoors I took a quick video test with ‘Moby Dick’ by Led Zeppelin on the background:

One more video outdoors to see how the camera adapted to the changes in luminosity with bright sun:

And a sample photo indoor:

and outdoors:

The main problem interacting with the device is the touch screen, I can’t hardly type without failing 1 of 3 letters, it doesn’t feel as accurate as my Google Nexus, although the Keon an Peak had similar problems in my experience.

Review

Well there are actually lots of good unboxing post and videos if you want to take a deeper view on the mobile device (all in Spanish):

• http://blogthinkbig.com/unboxing-zte-open/
• http://www.movilzona.es/2013/07/01/unboxing-y-toma-de-contacto-en-video-del-zte-open-de-movistar/
• http://aplicacionesfirefox.es/zte-open-el-primer-movil-de-movistar-con-firefox-os/
• http://www.wayerless.com/2013/07/zte-open-a-primera-vista/

Thoughts

The ZTE Open its very similar on the outside and inside compared with the GeeksPhone Keon but its still the only one Firefox OS device for the normal user. I hope Movistar’s fork of FirefoxOS will not divert too much from the rest of mobile operators, just to avoid the damm fragmentation that we got on Android right now.

I see it as a feature phone killer for users like my parents: just need the device to be able to call, set alarms, see the calendar and find something on the internet or a map from time to time… and also comes with a nice touch screen and the dimensions are still acceptable for them. Someone is going to get a FirefoxOS device for Christmas!!

So we are finally stable and I can get back to business.

Meanwhile I was accepted as in the Firefox App Review Team, and wrote down two more ideas that hopefully will transform in nice FirefoxOS apps one day. Also bought an GeeksPhone Keon so the Peak doesn’t feel alone anymore.

I had the oportunitty to talk with @soyjavi, it’s always a bit weird to talk to someone well known that you follow on videocast and twitter but he doesn’t have a clue of who you are.

The talks where great and inspiring, speakers @jmcantera and Cristian Rodriguez I still had some memories from the talk on the past SpainJS conferences where I was able to touch the first prototype:

Some GeeksPhone devices where given as prize for technical questions but it felt almost random.

After a good lunchbrake that replenished my energies (I had traveled 285km by car that day without rest) I headed to the hackathon. But I didn’t knew anyone, and everybody seemed to had his group of pals and even some good ideas well prepared. There was going to be 4 categories to win a GeeksPhone device so it was totally a competition.

I was just hoping to at least learn how to create a basic app and be able to push it to a real device. I cloned the example app from Cristian’s github, and started to make changes to see what I could do.

Then I remembered a app idea that I had almost a year ago, very basic but still used the alarm and notification WebApi’s so I spent 15 or 20 minutes trying to define what the app would be able to do and the incremental steps.

#jffos hackathoneando pic.twitter.com/R6cucvEGxm

— movilforum (@movilf) May 17, 2013

The first problem was the FirefoxOS simulator, that didn’t seem to be able to handle the Alarms WebApi and until I found that hitting Command+R the app wash refreshed so I didn’t need to push it again and again. Then I made a simple visor.html to test the visual styles on the browser more quickly:

1

<iframe src="index.html" width="320px" height="480px" />

After 3 hours the time ran out and each group made a quick presentation in 1-2 minutes, we saw great but incompleted ideas, some others fully developed but a bit useful, and the greater ones where just awesome like their whatsapp clone Firetalk!

#jffos vamos a hacer un cliente de mensajería :-) pic.twitter.com/6QZvor1ow5

— movilforum (@movilf) May 17, 2013

Then the jury went out of the room and I started to pack my things because I was very hungry and still had a 1 hour ride back home. But I was awared with the prize to the best app in the e-Health category, didn’t truly believe it and even felt like it wasn’t quite deserved, but talking before with the jury they told me that being alone and able to deliver a functional and useful app was the key for me to win.

pues tras la deliberación del jurado tenemos a los ganadores #jffos pic.twitter.com/D2IRJHldo2

— movilforum (@movilf) May 17, 2013

So thats the story of how I got my GeeksPhone Peak all alone in a hackathon 285km far from home ;)

So here I am, getting back on business, interesting and life-changing things happened to me this year and I think a have enough to write about the past, present and future. I’ll be mainly writting about professional on mobile and web development, personal things normally go on facebook lately.

I’ll start with some plugins and theme customizations in my spare time. Welcome!