James on Software

Let's start with the biggest news. This has been a long time in the making. At Rubyfringe, Francois, Daniel, and I had a long conversation about how great it would be if we could work together.

We gave it a shot for Rails Rumble, in which we built what does this error mean. We won for most useful, which we took as a sign that our idea of working together was a good one.

I can't express how excited I am and privileged I feel to be working with François and Daniel. They are truly top notch in every way. Their contributions to open source, previous projects, and resumes speak for themselves.

If you don't know these amazing guys, you can read about François and Daniel on our new site!

The New giraffesoft.ca

Thanks to our good friends over at Arktyp and the awesome Webby framework, we finally have a real website. With plenty of work coming in over the last 14 months or so, I was having a really hard time motivating myself to put a full fledged site together.

Well, now that the team is growing, I finally got my shit together to finish up the site. I'm really excited to be able to show off some of our past projects and open source work. We've got a full range of services products and we're finishing up an app or two that you'll hear more about soon. So, check it out. It's awesome.

This is just the beginning. There'll be some more giraffesoft announcements soon, so stay tuned.

Over the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed Montreal on Rails. There have been lots of awesome presentations, and general good times had by all.

When Carl asked for feedback on Uservoice, a lot of people seemed interested in more presentations geared towards newbies. While presentations can be really interesting and useful, most of the best programmers I know learned their craft through open source work. There’s no better way to improve your skills (not to mention your profile in the industry).

So, I’ve been thinking about organizing a monthly, open source hackfest.

It would be an informal evening where people could come and work on FLOSS. If you have a project, it would be a great place to get help from some of your local ruby gurus, or just an excuse to work on your project. If not, it’d be a great place to pick up a project and learn from other developers.

At the end of every evening, we could have a few lightning talks (5mins), to give people the opportunity to show off what they’ve been working on. Or not, if nobody wants to speak. Only rule: no preparation allowed. No slides. Nothing.

Think of it sort of like Zed Shaw’s Freehacker’s Union, minus the hazing ritual for new members.

So, what do you think? If we turned MoR in to an open source hack fest for a couple of months, would you miss the presentations? Is this something you’re interested in trying out? Will you be offended if we open it up to all things Ruby, instead of just rails?

Please direct your comments to the post on the MoR blog.