Mike Subelsky's Blog

Undoing Your Social Training and Creative Inhibitions in Five Minutes

2009-05-15T09:56:00.002-05:00

Last night, I was honored to be the first speaker at the first Ignite DC. My talk was called "Undoing Your Social Training and Creative Inhibitions in Five Minutes". The gist of my talk is:

"Our culture inculcates several behaviors that harm creative, entrepreneurial people: we're taught to avoid conflict and real, open honesty with one another, and we're taught to fear failure. This may work for creating a polite, civil society, but it doesn't serve the individual who is trying to make a difference. But there's hope! Improv theater actors have devised many techniques for overcoming these tendencies which enables them to create inventive stories extemporaneously. Mike will share ways to combat creative inhibitions gleaned from six years of teaching and performing improv theater."

The slides are below.

Undoing Your Social Training and Creative Inhibitions in Five Minutes

It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds

2009-05-11T08:10:00.003-05:00

At RailsConf last week I gave a talk called "It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds" where I shared all of our lessons learned with OtherInbox and cloud computing. I tried my best to go beyond the hype and talk about our real world experiences. The slides are below, but here's the raw list of lessons:

“Everything needs to be automated”

Autoscaling is the easiest part

Think carefully about credential management

You really could use internal DNS

It's maybe not that cheap

Launching servers is not that fast

You will become dependent on “glue” services

You will depend on a distant faceless provider

Use DVCS

You will spend a lot of time on monitoring

Your logs will runneth over

Write lots of “in-process tests”

Snapshots are slow

Rails will be the least of your worries

Cloud services involve subtle-yet-massive tradeoffs

SQS guarantees delivery at least once

Queue lengths inaccurate for <>
SQS not necessarily FIFO

So you may not want a cloud queue

SimpleDB optimized for writes, not reads

You must code defensively

There are no good "cloud sandboxes"

Pay attention to MySQL timeouts

"User account management is -not- ideal."

You are locked-in to your provider

Relational DB may not be the best choice

Is there a benefit?
- Changes the way you write code
- You can start right away
- Pretty awesome redundancy

It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds

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2009-04-27T10:03:00.002-05:00

On Saturday I gave an "Introduction to SproutCore" talk at JSConf, the world's first all-JavaScript conference. It was a great conference and highly recommended. Videos will be posted over the next several weeks. For now, for those interested, my slides are below.

Introduction to SproutCore at JSConf

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My tutorial at RailsConf 2009

2009-04-17T09:07:00.005-05:00

I'm teaching a three-hour tutorial at RailsConf 2009 on SproutCore and Rails, called "Building Next Generation Web Apps with Rails and SproutCore". Since three hours isn't a whole lot of time, I wanted to post some things that students can do to prepare to get the most out of the training.

See you in Las Vegas!

Prerequisites

We'll use the stable release of SproutCore (0.9.23) although I plan to address what's different about the 1.0 API which is currently in alpha testing. So to be able to work in the tutorial, you'll need recent versions of Ruby and RubyGems. Follow these directions to install SproutCore.

Note that the SproutCore gem depends on merb-core (>= 0.9.9), erubis, rubigen, and mongrel.

Before the tutorial starts, you must be able to view localhost:4020. If that works, you know everything installed correctly.

This may go without saying, but you also need to have Rails 2.3.x installed. Specifically you should be able to load the Rails startup page on your development machine at http://localhost:3000/.

Scaling Rails in the Cloud With Audio and Video

2009-03-25T10:55:00.003-05:00

At SXSW Interactive I gave a talk called "Scaling Rails in the Cloud", about our experiences building OtherInbox using Amazon Web Services. The organizers have just posted an MP3 file of the audio of my talk, so now you can view the slides with accompanying audio.

Update: the video is now posted in six parts on Youtube!

Scaling Rails Applications In The Cloud

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Scaling Rails in the Cloud

2009-03-15T06:49:00.004-05:00

Yesterday at SXSW Interactive I gave a talk called "Scaling Rails in the Cloud", about our experiences building OtherInbox using Amazon Web Services. My slides are below. When I wrote this presentation, I really came to the realization that Rails has hardly ever been the problem for us, scaling-wise. The framework has served us very well; all of our problems have stemmed from we the developers not understanding our tools as well as we could have, or not thinking things through. So the actual Rails content is light, but that's because Rails fits right into a cloud environment and we didn't have to do anything special to make it work.

Scaling Rails Applications In The Cloud

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Maryland Software Entrepreneur Survey Results

2009-02-23T17:35:00.008-05:00

Last week I asked all of the software entrepreneurs I know in Maryland to fill out a quick survey about what they kinds of help they'd like to receive in building their companies. I asked this because I want propose a project to help my fellow entrepreneurs in Maryland, but I felt I should do more listening before I do any more talking.

I promised I would anonymously summarize the results of the survey, so here's what people had to say. Ten people of very different backgrounds responded. It's totally unscientific but I think it was a fairly diverse sample.

What type of assistance would be most useful to you in starting or growing a software business in the greater Baltimore area?

"...an organization, funded by the state or outside investments that acts as a seed funder for startups...an Angel-like organization that invests time/resources rather than capital. Local people with ideas for new software would submit proposals and the team would decide on the top 1-3 and develop a beta. So rather than having a group of investors involved, it would be a group of developers that invest their time in exchange for equity."
"A mentor match-up service of some sort might be good. With our startup, we have basically had to teach ourselves everything because we didn't really have anyone to talk to who's already been through it."
"I think the most needed type of assistance, in my opinion, is business/legal administration. Such things as incorporating a business, accounting, taxes, payroll, accepting credit cards for products/services, etc. I might have a great idea and working app, but then need to put in almost as much work to setup and manage the business side."""
"A real calendar of tech events, with .ICS (so I can import into Google Calendar or Outlook or whatever I use), embeddable (just via GCal), RSS feed, twitter feed. Something where I can actually go and see a list of events hosted by Refresh, Bmore on Rails, etc...You'd think this problem was solved already, but apparently not."
"...some forum / roundtable type of thing where people can just talk ideas would be neat too. Perhaps OpenCoffee, with some more structure, up in Baltimore somewhere. It would be nice if something like this varied in location, so that for example, it's not always down at the hive. Then again, there is arguably some benefit in having it at a standardized location."
"Funding...Baltimore Angels is good, but they only meet every other month."
"Exposure. Needs to be more talk about what local entrepreneurs are building...have to raise the profile of Baltimore for outside money. People have to hear about what is going on in Baltimore and see it as a hub of growth and activity, and look at startups in the area as worth investing in."
"Support - I love the local Open Coffee...it's less than 5 people, and everyone is doing their own thing, so no one is afraid to be open and talk. It's been very helpful for me and I've found the atmosphere great."
"Peer groups/advisors/coaching, all of which I have found in the area."
"1) access to capital
2) talented technologists
3) universities that are engaged in the entrepreneurial world
4) service providers (lawyers, accountants, insurance agents, PR firms, recruiters, etc) who understand start-ups, and have appropriate business models
5) mechanisms which support the free flow of talent
6) a cheerleading environment where mentors are easily found and entrepreneurs benefit from the region's self-promotion
7) a culture which recognizes those who try -- even when they fail."
"...my greatest challenge was in recruiting talent. Finding people who have actually marketed software, or developed commercial C++ applications was an enormous challenge!"
"We are terribly underserved by the absence of an entrepreneurial culture at JHU. Perhaps, that's beginning to change, but it will take time to play out. I recently attended a discussion on the macroeconomic impact of entrepreneurialism at MIT; it's simply staggering!...Without the active engagement of our local universities, we'll never build a sufficient flow of new companies into our region."

What are your biggest challenges?

"The biggest problem is tapping into true seed money. It seems that seed money for early stage startups is virtually non-existent. There are various Angel groups in the area and there is money to be invested, but rarely are the investors ever interested in being the first dollars spent by the company.

"Given this, it seems that a development based Angel group could help mitigate the high risk of true early stage companies such that more good ideas would get off the ground"
"Again, never having done this before, our biggest challenge is knowing what it is we're supposed to even do or not do as a 'real' business."
"One big problem with not knowing what to do, is not immediately knowing who can help you sort those things out. With regards to legal issues, we've already been through two big-name law firms that charged big $, but they had almost no experience with startups and were not able to guide us well at all."
"I think my biggest challenge is once I have established business and working app (which is a challenge in itself), is marketing and getting the word out as well as creating a sustainable revenue model."
"Knowing who to trust....and whose referrals to trust."
"Finding talent. Dealing with taxes."
"...finding leads is of course a big thing."
"As for products, hashing through marketing and sales plans...Putting processes in place to fill a pipeline, getting the word out, building sales efforts, etc. And 'getting the word out' - and marketing and sales in general - is different for products for a niche vs. products for the online masses. Looking for money too is a challenge...but it seems like Baltimore Angels is trying to address that."
"Money. Finding good people. Money"

Is there anything else you'd like to say?

"Go Baltimore. All of this stuff is wicked exciting. I moved here because it was the closest city to home. I'm staying because Baltimore is poised to claim a huge stake in the future of big tech happenings."
"I think some kind of Y Combinator in Baltimore would be great. The combination of funding, help creating a company, and ongoing support is what I would really need to create a successful software company. I also like the idea of having a group or association of small, local software companies that have weekly/monthly meetings to discuss and brainstorm and help each other out with their ideas and possibly code."
"I think there is still a gap between the money and then entrepreneurs. It's a hard gap to bridge."
"I've heard many times that there just aren't enough companies in Baltimore to justify more private equity. That's just not true! Moreover, there are micro communities emerging - such as with gaming or social media...Growing these communities brings more talent to the region, which leads to more successes."
"...individuals are vitally important to an entrepreneurial success. When they come together, they create new companies. When they network, they're looking to challenge themselves, often by changing jobs. Changing jobs in Baltimore's tech world is difficult due to its relatively small size and lack of a networking forum. Making it easy for individuals to meet and network not only eases the free flow of talent (one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so successful), but causes people to want to continue their association with the networking forum that's proven helpful."
(Several respondents graciously offered to help out or be included in any discussions, so I'll be sending some emails and things -- add a comment below if you are interested)

Baltimore's Internet Economy as I See It

2009-01-25T20:45:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of creative people in Baltimore working with Internet technology. At events like SocialDevCampEast, Beehive, Refresh, Bmore on Rails, Twin Tech, Outlet, or Ignite, you'll meet a ton of them. Many technical people in and around Baltimore have a national following, and I've run into them at far-flung events like Techcrunch50 and Lone Star Ruby Conference. We have several successful entrepreneurs in our midst who have built great Internet businesses. A recent accounting of greater Baltimore's IT industry gives us top rankings for many tech indicators. Baltimore's economy definitely has the human capital to succeed in the Internet industry.

Yet few of these talented people are starting or working for product companies. I rarely meet someone who's involved in making something that he or she owns. Baltimore's Internet economy, as far as I can tell, mostly comprises consulting work, services, and government contracting. Those sectors are very strong, and bring a lot of wealth to our region, but product companies have much more potential to improve the long-term prospects of our economy. Because they involve greater risk, product companies create a lot of wealth for investors and early employees, who then go on to invest in the next round of startups. Service businesses have less growth potential since they are ultimately constrained by the hourly labor of their employees. When they don't work, income doesn't come in.

Why should it be this way? How do we encourage more product-based technology companies to form here? Starting a risky venture requires a leap of faith and a maverick move against the grain of what society expects you to do, so how can society foster these choices? In an email, Dave Troy gave me a great metaphor:

"...you can't make a wild mushroom grow. The only thing you can do is be sure the conditions are right. That means there needs to be enough biomass in the underlying organism, there has to be sufficient food, moisture, and the temperature has to be right. The mushroom has to want to grow on its own."

I don't presume to be any kind of a "startup mushroom farmer", as I am still working on my first startup. But I do think we have the potential makings of a startup ecosystem in place:

Exemplars of success: Advertising.com, BillMeLater, Image Cafe, and other companies were started here, and there's a strong software game industry in Hunt Valley.
Integrated economy: Baltimore and DC are closely connected, being less than an hour away by train or car. We are part an Amtrak corridor connecting us to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
Low cost of living: you can buy a lot of house in Baltimore in a nice neighborhood (including one of the best-planned great places in America) and lead the kind of urban, connected lifestyle much prized by creative people.
Tolerance and diversity: Although our neighborhoods are largely segregated, it's still the kind of town where noncomformists can feel at home. We've got John Waters, the High Zero festival, Theater Project, Creative Alliance, and the Visionary Arts Museum, just to name a few examples.
Community spirit: In my experience, people in Baltimore really want you to succeed at whatever you're starting or trying. If you want to make a movie or start a business or become an activist, few in this community will tell you that you can't; most will say "that's cool, how can I help?" I experienced this vividly when I helped found the Baltimore Improv Group and Ignite Baltimore. People in this city could not have been more supportive.
Culture and recreation: The greater Baltimore area encompasses many amenities that entrepreneurial people enjoy. Museums, symphonies, parks, book stores, art house movie theaters, coffee shops, major league sports franchises, etc.
Excellent university: There are many good schools in Baltimore, but Johns Hopkins in particular has a global reputation, and is a fertile recruiting ground for local technology companies.
Talent pool: there are over 100,000 IT workers in Maryland according to the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore [link requires registration]. The Washington-Baltimore region is first in the US in the number of residents holding Bachelor's and graduate degrees.

With a little more investment of energy, time, and resources, I believe we could capitalize on these assets by priming the conditions for startup growth. Here are some ideas for what else we could do:

More visible angel investment: If I have the skills and ambition to start a technology company, how do I meet someone who has the capital and appetite for risk to invest in one, or tell me my idea needs more thinking through? As Dave Troy puts it:

"One of the valuable functions of an angel community is that it creates a mechanism for telling silly entrepreneurs to go pound sand; or to come back with a better idea or team. We don't have a very functional mechanism for handling any of that here right now. What we have is some risk-averse investors telling potentially good entrepreneurs to pound sand, and we have a lot of silly entrepreneurs pursuing ideas that they probably shouldn't. So, towards the notion of 'supporting' local startups, in my opinion the best way to 'support' them is not to encourage them or patronize them, necessarily, but rather to find ways for them to fail more quickly.

"...We need faster failures and quicker morphing of bad teams into good ones, and the pursuit of good ideas instead of bad ones...we need to provide real, objective guidance mechanisms to help entrepreneurs navigate the money and power networks they will need to master in order to succeed..."

Awesomely enough, Dave recently announced the formation of Baltimore Angels, and at last count 14 angels have signed on.

Develop a bootstrap network: Baltimore does not lack for ambition or ideas. I know of at least nine companies in various stages of growth (600block, Localist, Ipiqi, MPTrax, Ubernote, SpotCrime, AwayFind, DiscoverED, Sleep.FM -- these are software companies, because that's the field I follow). We should build up a bootstrap network to support and mentor such entrepreneurs and connect them to potential investors.
Reach out to students: Jared Goralnick pointed out to me that technical people graduating from college today assume they have only one choice - to get a high-paying, stable job (i.e., at a big consulting or contracting firm). It's an admittedly attractive choice - who would turn down the chance to make $80,000 or more right out of college? But students need to know there are other options that could prove more lucrative: starting their own company or joining a startup, options which may payoff financially but will no doubt payoff in terms of the business and technical education they offer. Recent college graduates can take bigger risks as they have less to lose and more to gain, but few students get that message. Jared is organizing an event scheduled for 4/11, watch his blog for more details.
Encourage self-organization: No formal entity could have started SocialDevCampEast, Coworking, Refresh, Outlet, or Ignite, but entities like GBTC, the University of Baltimore, and many local businesses have shown tremendous support for them. These groups are all run at low-cost with little or no budget, and they still need help. Our business and government leaders could do wonders by helping with facility rental, marketing, or publicity, or by attending the events, speaking at them, and mixing with the technical community.
Improved communications: I'd love for someone to start a blog chronicling the local startup scene and self-organizing tech events.
GBTC Round Table: I hear really good things about the GBTC's round table groups. If there was a group that focused on startup technology companies, I bet people would flock to it, as there aren't many opportunities for local Internet entrepreneurs to mingle exclusively with their peers. It would also demonstrate GBTC's commitment to helping product companies.

I've made some generalizations here, and what I've written is pretty specific to my experiences, but it's from the heart. My own startup, OtherInbox, is based in Austin, Texas, because that's where the principal founder is located, but also because it's a really ideal place to start a technology company. It's got all of the support mechanisms I mentioned above, and has had a few rounds of successful startups, so now the startup community is self-sustaining. Technical people in Austin can't help but encounter many examples of success, and there are a lot of investors willing to mentor them and invest in their dreams. Truly, Austin is ripe for wild mushroom growth -- yet Austin is more culturally and economically isolated than Baltimore. If they can do it, why can't we?

I'm a entrepeneur and technologist, a hacker and improvisor, and I want to spend my life starting and running technology companies. I'm also a transplanted son of Baltimore, with many friends and connections and roots here, and I really love this city. I want to make my dreams come true here, and I'm committed to doing whatever I can to make this the kind of place where every entrepeneur has that chance. So let's get going!

Thanks to Dave Troy, Stephen Muirhead, Bill Mill, Prescott Gaylord, and Jared Goralnick, who read drafts of this post and gave me great feedback.

Baltimore's Tech Calendar is PACKED

2009-01-16T19:31:00.003-05:00

I'm looking forward to all of these awesome upcoming tech events in and around Baltimore:

Twin Tech III in DC on 1/22/09: At Twin Tech II there were a ton of Baltimore luminaries in attendance, so this definitely counts
Tech meetup in Ellicot City on 1/27/09: This is the first event of a meetup organized by Todd Marks of Mindgrub
Social Media: User-Driven Experience in Canton on 1/27/09: I'm a panelist at this event, which aims to explore how companies, individuals and events have utilized social media successfully
Outlet Baltimore in Hampden on 1/28/09: This is a great idea, a casual social event for the new media crowd
Debut of Beehive Baltimore's coworking space in Canton on 2/1/09: I'm an active participant and big-time coworking buff. This is going to be awesome having our own space.
Ignite Baltimore #2 in Station North on 2/5/09: The event I organize with Patti Chan of 600block, along with guest organizer David Adewumi.
B'more on Rails in Upper Fells Point on 2/15/09: Topic is TBD, but this is where all the Rubyists in town converge.
First meeting of Baltimore Angels in Canton on 2/24/09: Spearheaded by local tech guru Dave Troy, this will really help raise the profile of angel investing in town
WordCamp Mid-Atlantic at the University of Baltimore on 5/16/09: This is Technosailor's baby!

February should also see another Refresh Bmore event, and before you know it, it'll be time for another SocialDevCampEast! If things keep going, we're gonna need to build a DC Tech Events style calendar!

The Wire tour of Baltimore

2008-12-30T12:49:00.006-05:00

A few people on Twitter asked me for the itinerary of The Wire tour I did last week with a friend who's a fan of the show who had come in from out of town. Here's a quick and dirty version. Mild spoiler alert!

Start at Penn Station. This is where Marlo Stanfield intentionally gets himself arrested (I think in season 4), thus confirming the wiretap that Prop Joe warned him about.
Drive south to City Hall. Several scenes throughout the series take place outside of City Hall, including a brief sequence in the opening. Across from City Hall, you'll see the veteran's memorial steps where Stringer Bell and Prop Joe convene so Joe can warn Stringer about police surveillance (after Cheese gets detained after the dogfight).
Drive south to the Inner Harbor. This is where Omar meets Stringer Bell at the end of season 1, trying to get Stringer Bell to talk about the Barksdale organization on tape.
Head east to the Broadway Market, where McNulty's kids follow Stringer Bell.
Head north on Broadway to see The Ritz, which in season one is Orlando's strip bar.
Head east to Canton Waterfront Park, home of the Baltimore Police Marine unit, where McNulty "rides the boat" in season 2.
Head east on Boston Street to see the Port of Baltimore, the focus of season 2.
Head northwest to Patterson Park, where Prop Joe meets with members of The Greek's organizaton.
Head east to Collington Square Park, and commence following the City Paper's Wire Tour, which covers several awesome sites from seasons 1-4, including Hamsterdam. My favorite stop is #5, Marlo's outdoor meeting spot, but seeing the rim store where Marlo hangs out is pretty awesome also.
After leaving stop #7 on the City Paper tour, also visit Greenmount Cemetery, site of numerous meetups and interesting scenes.

This tour is very light on west-side locations. If anyone wants to expand this itinerary, I would look at these sites:

The Independent's Wire Tour
Mapbuilder The Wire mashup [has a ton of shooting locations]

SproutCore and the Future of Web Apps at DCRUG

2008-12-24T09:32:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I presented an updated version of my SproutCore demo at DCRUG. Below is a video of it. Since you can't see the slides too well, so I also posted an updated copy of the slides on slideshare.

I borrow a lot from Charles Jolley's writings on the SproutCore blog for the introductory material about the uncanny valley etc.

random_data v1.5 Released

2008-11-15T12:12:00.002-05:00

The random_data gem provides methods for generating random test data including names, mailing addresses, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and text. v1.5 includes a primitive Markov text generator and an array "roulette" function.

Thanks to Hugh Sasse for contributing code for the new features!

SocialDevCampEast #2 recap

2008-11-05T10:41:00.002-05:00

SocialDevCampEast #2, held in Baltimore on November 1st, was another great tech event in Baltimore. The biggest value for me was making and reenforcing weak ties by connecting with people I don't directly work with or socialize with on a daily basis (especially people I only converse with via social media). For example, I got a chance to meet Adam Boalt and hear him talk about the success of RushMyPassport.com, which is the exact kind of business I'm interested in building in the future (something with online and offline components, and something that is not considered 'sexy' by most of the cognoscenti).

As far as presentations went, I gave a short version of my SproutCore demo and also led a session about cloud infrastructure (and what's not so great about it). The best sessions I attended were:

Jimmy Gardner posted some great photos that convey the feeling of the event. Congratulations to Dave Troy and Ann Bernard for another success!

SproutCore and the Future of Web Apps

2008-10-19T18:22:00.004-05:00

Bryan Liles took a great (but long) video of my recent presentation on SproutCore at B'More on Rails. A lot of my introductory material is adapted from the SproutCore blog especially this post from Charles Jolley.

The slides themselves are on slideshare.

This is a great technology that I'm having a lot of fun learning. Standby for more blog posts about it!

Ignite Baltimore and SocialDevCampEast

2008-10-15T09:07:00.002-05:00

Two really cool events are going down in the next couple of weeks here in Baltimore that everyone should check out.

Ignite Baltimore is an event I'm helping to organize where 16 people each get five minutes on stage to talk about something they are passionate about. We've got hackers, bloggers, painters, reverends, entrepreneurs, green builders, and so on all coming together to share what they know. The event debuts Thursday, October 16th at 6 pm at The Windup Space (12 W. North Ave).

The second SocialDevCampEast conference, taking place on November 1st, is a great gathering of the smartest tech innovators on the East coast. As Dave Troy writes:

SocialDevCamp is a real user-powered unconference with no commercial agenda -- the entire purpose is to CONNECT the leaders who will shape the next wave of tech innovation on the east coast. Come see how dynamic a truly user-powered conference can be!

I'm really interested in these events because they are a great way to connect with others interested in technology and digital culture, and learn new things while I'm doing it. See you there!

My Rails TakeFive interview

2008-09-19T12:35:00.002-05:00

Now that OtherInbox has launched we can publicly talk about what we're doing and why, and what technologies we use and why. I was honored to be interviewed for the FiveRuns "Take Five" feature.

Video of my talk at Lone Star Ruby Conference

2008-09-16T12:32:00.002-05:00

Confreaks has posted my entire Ruby in the Cloud talk from Lone Star Ruby Conference. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Here's a 30 second synopsis filmed by Gregg Pollack:

Today we launch OtherInbox!

2008-09-08T12:43:00.002-05:00

Josh and I are in San Francisco at Techcrunch50. Sometime between 1 and 5 pm Pacific time we'll be launching OtherInbox! You can see the demo live at otherinbox.com.

What a great year it's been! Thanks for everyone's help and support.

My talk at Lone Star Ruby Conference

2008-09-07T12:20:00.004-05:00

I had a great time at Lone Star Ruby Conference,

meeting fellow Rubyists and hanging out with the entire OtherInbox dev team. I had the privilege of speaking about all the benefits we've gained from using as much Ruby as possible in running our service. Confreaks will be posting the video soon, but here are my slides:

Ruby in the Cloud (PDF, 5.8 MB)

I really enjoyed sharing our experiences with the conference, but the highlight of the event for me was getting to hear the inventor of Ruby speak, and also getting to meet him. You will not meet a more generous, noble, joyful person than Matz, and I can't think of anyone I don't know personally who has had more of an impact on my professional life than him.

Ignite Baltimore Call for Participants

2008-08-19T19:28:00.002-05:00

Hey everyone, we're organizing Ignite Baltimore, and we're looking for interesting topics. Check out the site for more details, or visit these other city Ignite pages for inspiration:

If you're a Twitter person, follow @ignitebaltimore.

Humane Sproutcore Server Development Environment

2008-08-12T14:46:00.004-05:00

Recently I've started to build a new, rich user interface for OtherInbox using SproutCore, which has been very enjoyable. One thing that was not enjoyable was properly configuring my development environment.

In production, you'll usually deploy your SproutCore app as a static file, so all you have to do is arrange for your users to hit that URL (which out of the box is configured as /static, but could be anything).

In development mode, though, you want to be regenerating your client on the fly by serving it dynamically from sc-server. To use your app, you talk to http://localhost:4020, and if you want your client to communicate with a backend server, you configure the "proxy" setting in sc-config. Thus when the Sproutcore server gets a request for "/gadgets", it proxies that request to your local development server.

For some kinds of apps, this works well. For OtherInbox though, everything the Sproutcore app does requires you to be signed-in and have an active session with the Rails application server. This caused all kinds of cookie problems, probably because of same origin policy (e.g. my Rails app running at otherinbox.dev was issuing cookies that were somehow getting mangled by the proxying process).

Here's what I solved the problem. Check out my local Apache setup for details about the whole stack:

 <VirtualHost *:80>

 ProxyPass /app http://localhost:4020/other_inbox/
 ProxyPassReverse /app http://localhost:4020/other_inbox

 ProxyPass /static http://localhost:4020/static/
 ProxyPassReverse /static http://localhost:4020/static

 ProxyPass / http://localhost:3000/
 ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:3000

 ProxyPreserveHost on
</VirtualHost>

See how that works? When I load http://otherinbox.dev/app in the browser, Apache proxies that request to sc-server, which dynamically generates my Sproutcore client app.

When components of that app make requests for other parts of Sproutcore, using the /static URL, Apache also proxies those back to sc-server.

When the app makes requests for anything else, those requests get proxied by Apache to the Mongrel I have running the Rails code. Because my Sproutcore app is making REST calls to the backend, this ensures that anything the Sproutcore app asks for from my server gets proxied properly, in this case to localhost:3000.

As soon as I did this, all of the cookie issues were done. You'll also have to add some application-specific code about how you want to force logins if the user is not already signed-in. In our code, I just check for a logged-in cookie, and if it's not there, we open up the URL for a signin window.

Cool Medialets Micro-App

2008-07-30T14:19:00.005-05:00

My good friend Paul Barry and I have been helping our friends at Medialets out with a neat little Rails micro-app that culls iPhone App Store data from Apple's endless array of plists, and makes a chart, a dynamically-generated Gruff graph, and a bunch of RSS feeds.

My favorite thing about this app is the New Apps RSS feed which lets me keep up with the newest time-wasters/productivity enhancers for the iPhone. Let me take this opportunity to say that the world does not need any more iPhone tip calculators or fortune-telling games.

I wrote a bit more about the latest features over at the Medialets blog.

My iPhone app screens

2008-07-18T12:12:00.005-05:00

I got stuck for 90 minutes at the dentist office, so I decided to organize all my iPhone apps. First screen (left) is essentials, stuff I use every day. Second screen (right) is references and tools.

Third screen is "communications and entertainment". Fourth screen is the graveyard, for things I don't use regularly or can't get rid of.

I can think of worse ways to kill 90 minutes.

Contributing to Rails is easier than you think

2008-07-02T14:03:00.002-05:00

At OtherInbox we love open source and are looking for ways to share some of our labors with the community. Today I came across a great opportunity to contribute something to Ruby-on-Rails core development. I'm posting it here so everyone can see how easy it is to contribute.

I was building a JSON API to enable some new awesome features we're working on. Following the JSON request specification, I had the client setting its MIME type to "application/jsonrequest". But this was not causing Rails to recognize the request as JSON and thus the request body was not properly parsed. After doing some digging, I realized that Rails only looks for MIME type "application/json".

Fortunately, MIME type processing is implemented really humanely in Rails, so I whipped up a little patch that adds "application/jsonrequest" as a synonym for the JSON MIME type. First I wrote a test to prove that this was a problem. Once I had a failing test, I added the MIME type, and got my test passing. I followed the git patch instructions on lighthouse, then jumped into IRC #rails-contrib to garner support for it.

I happened to see that Rick Olson, the author of the existing JSON parsing code, was in the chat, so I pinged him with the lighthouse ticket. He tested it and applied it, and now our one line of code is a part of Rails!

Hopefully this will save some future JSON implementer a bit of pain.

Cross-posted from the OtherInbox blog

Speaking at Lone Star Ruby Conference

2008-06-10T09:34:00.003-05:00

I will be speaking at the Lone Star Ruby Conference in September about how we use Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the Amazon Web Services virtual cloud. Below is a summary of what I'll be talking about.

In OtherInbox, almost every system administration task imaginable is carried out using Ruby, meaning we as developers can enjoy all of Ruby's expressive benefits and spend less time scripting the shell, writing cron tasks, or using other languages. Because we make fewer context switches from thinking in Ruby to thinking in other languages, we also reap a big productivity benefit.

Using Ruby throughout our cloud also means that porting the application to run in different production environments is a trivial task, because Ruby is the glue connecting the Ruby components together, thus all we require is a Ruby interpreter to deploy.

Two key Ruby technologies have matured in the previous 18 months which make it ideal for almost every layer of managing a cluster of servers:

god.rb allows fine-grained process monitoring and daemon control (a la monit)
rufus-scheduler enables Ruby-based scheduling (replacing cron, and providing a great facility for running daemons that must be executed on a recurring basis)

When combined with these Ruby workhorses, developers today can spend much more of their time writing Ruby code, and less time struggling with the vagaries of their production environment:

Ruby standard library utilities (File, FileUtils, etc.)
Rake
Capistrano (for any kind of remote application, not just Rails)

The talk will also include a discussion of using several different AWS gems to make cloud computing simple, by illustrating the use of Amazon's S3 and SQS services to distribute asychnronous work and handle communication between servers.

(cross-posted from the OtherInbox blog)