RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 2

September 19th, 2007

First of all, some of the presentation downloads for RailsConf Europe have started appearing on the O’Reilly site here, so please run along and grab them. Nothing to see here.

Well ok, i’ll continue live-blogging from the afternoon sessions but I have a plane to catch soon :-)

Development Case Study: MindMeister

I’ve chosen the lest technical session because sometime the anecdote, the story, is more useful than the code. Development Case Study: MindMeister is the story off the online mind mapping tool “The google docs of mind mapping” apparently.

MindMeister It’s all AJAX (and a lot of it), tough call I think the interface could be way better in Flex and you have offline Mind-mapping possibilities with AIR.

They started with prototyping, then some design concepts , which all looked quite good if you ask me.

The name was the hardest thing to fine.

I hear that.. It is very hard to find a name. I agree you shouldn’t be obsessed with finding a free .com domain name, 37signals never did.

Private betas are good, 2 launches making it exclusive with lots of feedback. Starting with just friends but allowing invites to others. No longer than 2 months with an upgrade offer at the end.

They got lots of competitors and clones after launching which I think is a common problem, just make sure you are the brightest and the best. MindMeister have some good user stats, better traffic than their competitors (according to Alexa) but less features than the competitors. Usability is what makes them better. Every euro spent on design is worth it..

Recommendations

Marketing

Technical Issues

It seems MindMeister are going offline with Google Gears which is the right move, maybe AJAX was a good choice after all. Use a canvas library which turns to VRML on IE.. And Wirecard

I’ve got to day playing with it now MindMeister is pretty good, its slick works well and I can see how it would be both useful and easy with is important in brainstorming tools. Bravo guys!

Outsourcing to Open Source

Another non-technical session Outsourcing to Open Source from Tobias Luetke at “Shopify’:http://www.shopify.com/. I chose this because i’m a real fan of Shopify, JapedPixel and because it’s more relevant to my business than the others. But I wish I could also have gone to Exploring Very Rapid Web Development Techniques with Hobo by Tom Locke, but those the breaks..

Tobias is talking about Liquid which for those that don’t know is a safe templating method for Rails which you can give to customers to make their own designs/themes without them breaking your app. And he wrote it on the plain to RailsConf 2005!! Not only is it safe but only exposes what you want to expose ie.


class Product << ActiveRecord::Base
liquid_methods :title, :price, :description

If you don’t know about liquid, go look it up. If you ever developing a SaaS with needs safe themes for users, its a great fit. Tobias is also talking about Vision which is a downloadable theme engine which works offline. Using this tool the launched a competition for themes for shopify with an iPod nano, the people who entered then now do full time Shopify themeing and earn more money from it than JadedPixel!!

Vision works by donwloading a Mock version of Shopify with no backend but the objects returned have real like data. Like a massive test case your users can download and theme.

JapedPixel also issued the open source AcitveMerchant as a library for payment processing gateways. It is really useful contribution to Rails. It supports 40+ gateways. Often they are commission by shopify customers who pay a ruby developer to contribute a specific merchant to ActiveMerchant which then automatically appears in Shopify. This is a great example of crowd-sourcing helping the community which then helps your product. It’s like work for free….

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help analyze large amounts of data.

Examples of crowdsourcing are threadless.com, freebase, Mechanical Turk, PeertoPatent, OrganizedWisdom. Tobias simple example of CrowdSourcing is giving your users the ability to create a new translation of text in checkout and feed that back to the system. They get credit for the translation and shopify track the progress of translation. This allows them to email authors when they add a new string that needs translation.

A really good talk from Tobias but he could have gone into the theme of crowd-sourcing more than than shopifies use of it, then given the examples. Just a structural thing.

For those interested. Shopify use Solr and love it. From being a public facing Rails application they get some really random requests such as a whole Shakespeare text in a param!. The run 25,000 public facing with different URLs, so they get a lot of web-spiders on the servers. They use memcache generating a unique key for every possible input for a page, check memcache to see if it has a version. If memcache doesn’t have it they gzip it and stick it in memcache. They use version numbers of each object and the version number is part of the key, instead of expiring they just have to lookup a new key and get a cachemiss so generate it. No cache invalidation.

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