I participated this year, and managed to develop a personal stretch reminder, called Sheep Fit. You can visit the application for the beta use here. The blog, with all the creation step was maintained during these 48 H by Nathalie Cacahuete.

How was it ?

Very hard. I was alone for all the development and the design and the deployement process. So just a bit wired not to finish in time.

Because there were contestants from all over the world, the competition started at 00:00 GMT in the night from Friday to Saturday, and finished 48 hours later.

The first coding night was ok, but I was really too tired on the second night.

Lots of trouble with the app, with timezones (finally I had to go in rails 2.1 instead of 2.1.1 …) and with the Linode server. I really thanks Matt for the good advice he gave me : Go to bed 5 hours and come back to finish your application.

What did i learn ?

I have to write test …. really. I don’t write full application test usually, just a few and then that bores me. But this this experience made it clear to me : Tests are the key to develop productively. If you don’t write them you’ll lost and waste too much time resolving bugs which should not be there.

I’ve downloaded the 3 RSpec Peepcode videos and I’ll take time to look at them carefully.

Other developers were really cool. When I shared on twitter my fears about not finishing the application, I had plenty of messages pushing me to keep going and not to stop. Thanks you all.

What was the best part ?

1. Nathalie’s gingerbread

2. Deploy the application and saw it live

Last week I was really busy. A lot of work in my day job, and a lot of work at home on the travelplanner.

I’m now really proud to annonce that Nathalie, my partner, will help me in the launch of the two projects.

What are these 2 projects?

    The first one is a travel planner. The blog and a launch page will be open this week.
This travel planner will help you creating, discovering and sharing you future journeys.
A very cool application, with a mobile and an Iphone access (in preparation).
The blog will be a beautiful blog, with gorgeous travel photos and travel tips, as well as focuses on some travellers

    The second application will be our RailsRumble application. SheepFit.
Just a cool way of not forgetting to take your eyes off the PC (or the MAC) sometimes.
And if you’re very inspired, you’ll also be able create your own stretching programme, and hope for having a lot of persons following you
The blog will be a fun blog, with some cool strench advice, and some tiredness killer tips.

What are going to be the 2 roles?

    I’m a developer, with a geekly nerd view on marketing things. But Nathalie, is a marketing lover. She studied marketing in France, and after worked for 10 month in Lafarge     Plasterboard, she is now looking for a fun job in or around Bristol, Uk. (Take a look to her cv)

    So, Nathalie will be in charge of the Blog and News, and all the marketing/communication stuff.
During the rails rumble, she is going to update the blog, hour by hour, keeping you up-to-date with the state of the application during its creation. Brilliant idea.

    I’ll be in charge of all the technical posts on these blog, and on all the Ruby on Rails development.

How can you help us delivering new cool web apps?

   The first thing you can do is subscribe to this blog RSS (click here)

   The second thing you can do is follow our projects on twitter. We opened the sheepfit twitter account today (Follow Sheepfit)

   The third thing is  spread the word about these applications and blogs ;).

   Thank you very much for your support, we are looking forward to hearing from you on these ideas. The sheepfit blog will be open tonight, stay tuned.]]> http://www.notgeeklycorrect.com/english/2008/10/13/the-2-projects-launch-week/feed/ http://www.notgeeklycorrect.com/english/2008/10/11/10-places-left-for-the-rails-rumble/ http://www.notgeeklycorrect.com/english/2008/10/11/10-places-left-for-the-rails-rumble/#comments Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:10:51 +0000 Nicolas http://www.notgeeklycorrect.com/english/2008/10/11/10-places-left-for-the-rails-rumble/ The rails rumble team inform us (on their blog) that they manage to open more Rails Rumble seat.

There are now 10 seat left. Hurry up.

WiseStamp Firefox Exension is for you.

This little extension will add a new button on the bottom right of your Firefox status bar. You’ll just have to do a right click, edit, and start your new signature creation.

A basic HTML editor (with Bold, Underline, Link, Center, Image … ) and some very useful Instant Messenger and WebServices helpers icons, like Facebook or linkedin, will be at your disposal on the WiseStamp interface.

Once saved, you’re new signature will be automatically sent with your emails.

The only problem is that WiseStamp is only available for Firefox for the moment.

I was looking for a simple solution for a long time now, thanks to Eric from www.presse-citron.net.

Here is my new signature :

What is Bort ?

      Ruby on Rails popularity brings to it a lot of very good plugins. And it’s that, on 98 % case, when you start a new project from scratch, you’re going to do every times the same thing.

      From starting your test with Rspec to install the lastest version of RESTFUL Authentication, we do all the same thing every time.

      So Bort is just an easy to use starting point, like the scaffolds sometimes.

How can I play with it ?

      Open a terminal and clone Bort git repository : clone git://github.com/fudgestudios/bort.git  (or download it directly from the GitHub )

      Then a Rake db:migrate will do the magic.

What’s inside ?

      At this time, a Bort fresh installation come with :

1. RESTful Authentication and params
2. User Roles
3. Open ID Authentication
4. Will Paginate
5. Rspec & Rspec-rails
6. Exception Notifier
7. Asset Packager
8. Capistrano recipes

       A rake:bort:[plugin name] will help you to an easy install of some useful plugins.

How can you help ?

        On his blog, Jim Neath calls for developers ideas, so give a look and report bugs/ideas here

For three months now I’ve managed to migrate my project on the Git version control system.

Just found, yesterday night, a Git plug in for Netbeans. It’s the first version, not all the commands are implemented, but, you will have the commit one, the diff one and the update. For the branches and the tag, you will need to wait a little.

Why use a version control :

A version control is a must have for every kind of project development.

A version control will help you to :

• Save your code
• Keep a trace on what you are doing
• Keep a history of the changes
• View the difference between the old version of the file(s) and the local one
• Keep your modification and your code safe when you work in a team
• Tag and branche your code for a better organization

And more and more and more …

The most commonly used in companies are : CVS or his fork Subversion (svn), Mercurial, Git.

You can find a good review about seven different version control systems on Smashing Magazine.

What is Git :

Git is a distributed version control system. It means that every developer of the team own a copy of the repository on their disk.

This is the one chosen by the Ruby on Rails core team development and now a lot of rails plugins (Before it was SVN).

Pro :

• Distributed version
• Quick (very quick)
• Easy to manage
• GitHub
• Open Source

Cons :

• ? I do not see any for the moment

You can find a Git cheat sheet here and the official website is here.

What’s GitHub :

GitHub is an ‘easy to open’ and cheap Git server repository provider.

Instead of managing a repository server (and the data backup/security/cost … who come with) you can open an account with GitHub and manage free public repositories.

If you need to have some private projects, you can sign up for a pay monthly account from 7$ a month.

It’s really easy to use, and if you’ve already used another version control system the ‘learning curve’ will be very short.

Your repository will be on safe hands, and will be backup on two others servers, and pushing code is only allowed if you give them your SSH keys.

So, and this Netbeans Git plugins :

Netbeans 6.5 comes with some source control plugins, but there ISN’T ANY for Git.

This issue is corrected with the NBGit plugin, purposed by Jonas.

You can find the plugin here and the git repository here. The official website is on http://nbgit.org.

For the moment there are only the basic operations like Commit/Update and Diff, but I hope branches and tags will come quickly.

I tried it yesterday night, it worked fine for me. Perhaps this plugins will help me to decide definitively between my Gedit a la Textmate and Netbeans.

After long hesitation, I finally took a place for the Rails Rumble 2008.

What’s the Rails Rumble :

Basically, you have 48 Hours long to build from scratch a deployable Ruby on Rails web application.

Every team will have a virtual seat. The rumble starts on October 18th 2008 at 00:00 GMT and stops on October 19Th 2008 at 23:59 GMT.

Every team can have between 1 and 4 persons.

You’re not allowed to start coding/design before or after the 48 hours.

Your application will be judge during 10 days after the competition.

Who can participate :

Any Ruby on Rails developer with an idea to develop, all levels.

My Project :

I’ll try to have a complete Online Cv builder working.

My Rails Rumble project page is online, with the Sheep’n Geek team name.

If you have some reasonable ideas for it, I’ll take them to consideration

Sponsors and prizes :

You can find on the Rails Rumble blog all the sponsors names, with their contributions.

And now :

I have my day job, my travel planner project, and this contest … Ho, and our anniversary with my peanut. I’m going to be very busy.

Goog luck to all contestants.

Like a lot of other website, BustAName will help you on the hard task of finding the perfect domain name.

But BustAName has a little something in plus.

The design is good, usability is really good, response time is very good, with the ajax form you’ll be able to try a lot of combinations in a short time.

Basically you have 2 choices :

1. Add some word on a list, and the website will do every combination possible with all words and check if they are free
2. Just check a domain on a .com / .org / .net

Another very good service to bookmark.