This is the first week that FiveRuns is at its new downtown Austin location. Leading up to the move, many of us were talking about how we’d be modifying our commutes to either use public transportation, carpool, or just flat out enjoy the fact that our office is more centrally located. These are my before and after calculations, and I’m hoping that others on the FiveRuns team join in and post their figures. I’m going to include my wife’s mileage also because carpooling factors into the equation. I’m also doing quite a bit of rounding.
Before:
Me: 38 miles round-trip x 5 days / 32mpg = 6 gallons of gas/week
My wife: 19 miles round-trip x 5 days / 25mpg = 4 gallons of gas/week
Fortunately the new office is close to where my wife works and we are going to shoot for carpooling every day.
After:
Both of us: 25 miles round-trip x 5 days / 32mpg = 4 gallons of gas/week
It feels pretty awesome to think about eliminating 60% of our fuel usage, saving us about $25 dollars a week. Granted, this is pretty much an optimal situation, being lucky enough to move both closer to home and within range of a carpool situation.
Personally, I like the idea of free markets showing us pain in the pocketbook when it comes to fuel. Eventually, people will start making changes in their life and we can start to affect the demand side of the supply/demand equation.
FiveRuns developer Adam Keys joined Jason and Gregg at RailsEnvy for a round of public service announcements on the Model View Controller framework. You saw them at RailsConf, and I’m sure you’ll see them around the Internets, but here they are for your viewing pleasure! To kick it off, MVC #1 – Controller Obesity
Which ones do they recommend? Which ones do they bring to work, share with their team or ask to have purchased for the office? What’s on the rest of our staff’s reading list? Well, I’m the guy that buys them for FiveRuns, so here’s a snapshot of our bookshelf.
Let me start by saying I’m a happy user of different content management systems (CMSs). I appreciate some of the work involved in their development (e.g. I’ve had the chance to build a small one, which was ugly, painful and slow), and I’ve had the chance to use some open source and proprietary CMSs. In fact, I expect we will use Radiant soon for some of our content, and I appreciate its simplicity and focus.
However, I’ve always wanted to extend a CMS to work with content versions like I think about it – i.e. like a software developer.
For better or worse, I look at content management from the same POV as I do managing code. Let me explain further: any software project I’ve been involved with saves its source code in a source repository with revision control. Additionally, we typically use the repository to create a snapshot of the code and set it aside for some particular purpose (e.g. test a new version, debug and fix a production version, etc.) [note by snapshot, I’m speaking generically; e.g. for subversion, it’d be ‘svn copy’, for cvs, it’d be ‘cvs tag’]. This ability allows us to have several streams of work going in parallel, e.g. developing new stuff, bug fixes on the pending release and bug fixes on an already released version in production.
However, the CMSs I’ve used all have their own notion of revision control (if any at all) and none of them follow a similar workflow as we do in development. For example, if I am developing a new revision to a product, then I want to be able to author the content for that revision separate from other versions. Yet, the CMSs I’ve used force me to keep all of my content integrated into their system and co-mingled with administrative data. Some of them offer a notion of versioning – but I’ve not found one that is consistent with how I’ve done versioning in development.
At best, I have something like Radiant’s ability to export & import the whole database, and then sync that up with the versions of the software I’m working on in development.
What would I like? I’d like the ability for content to be separated out in a CMS which will allow me to integrate with the source repositories I use, so that I can manage the content as part of the same workflow I use with managing versions of software. When will I fix this? It’s on my list of side projects…
Last week, a story on NPR heralded Sony’s Blu-ray as the victor in the high-definition format war. I’ve always been critical towards people that are early adopters of technology, but in the context of being somewhat early (late 2006) to the Ruby on Rails world, my previous criticisms of early adopters was inconsistent. I mulled it over on the way to work one day and I think the pros and cons of adopting a new piece of technology vary widely depending on the scenario:
Scenario 1: Two new high definition media formats are trying to get into your living room. You carefully make a decision to purchase one very early on.
Upside:
You get to watch movies in HD from the day you purchased your system until the day the format war is over.
If you made the right bet, you get to enjoy your purchase longer.
Downside:
The format you chose ends up losing. You slap yourself in the head for not remembering the lesson you learned with LaserDisc.
You’re basically paying inflated prices for doing market research and beta testing.
You end up feeling kind of dumb in 2 years when you’re still making minimum payments on the credit card for that thousand dollar player and 40 dollar movies when the same player will probably cost about 10% of its launch price. This assumes the format you chose won the format war.
Scenario 2: You’re a developer and a new framework comes on the scene and you read lots of good articles and blog posts about it. You decide to buy a book on the subject and do a little coding at night on fun little pet projects
Upside:
You learn and become a better developer.
The framework ends up doing well and you have the experience to get a better job (could be better pay, more enjoyment or both). Because you were early to the scene, you have the potential to be a master at it and that could pay off in spades.
Downside:
The framework ends up being a flash in the pan and goes nowhere. You have given up much of the upside, but you’ll have learned some things that apply to what you do at work. You chalk it up to continuing education.
Overall, the smart bet is to keep the gadget lust low and keep the focus on education. Be aggressive towards learning and passive towards consumerism. Keep that in mind and you’ll come out ahead when it comes to technology adoption and decision-making.
The 2007 Crunchies are here. This is a new award competition put on by the GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch folks that will recognize the most compelling startups, internet, and technology innovations of the year. We think FiveRuns is worthy of some recognition – do you?
We think we’re a fit for several of the categories. To name a few: Best technology innovation/achievement, Best business model, Best design, Best enterprise start-up, and of course, Best overall.
If you think our Rails application monitoring capabilities are unique and innovative, or if you are a fan of our subscription-based business model, or if you dig our user interface, ease of use, and the entire FiveRuns user experience for monitoring your Rails applications, we’d certainly appreciate your nomination.
To vote, click on the graphic below or visit: http://vote.crunchies.techcrunch.com. Deadline for nominations is Wednesday, December 12th.
OK, shameless PR plug is over, but seriously – if you like what we’re doing with Rails application monitoring – Vote for FiveRuns!
The FiveRuns site was picked up and featured in a ton of css design showcases lately. So, congratulations to Scott Boms at Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. and everyone at FiveRuns who contributed to the new site.
I am catching up with my current events this afternoon. Being annoyed at what passes for news. Then I came across this headline: Baby Monitor Picks Up Video from NASA. It turned out not to be as exciting as I had hoped. Apparently the video is not coming directly from the shuttle, but rather from the webcast on NASATV.
If you go to the NASA site you can actually watch some video from the shuttle as well as ground control. Right now, most of the people working at ground control are just staring at the one woman talking to the shuttle crew.
Once you are on the NASA site, there is all kinds of cool things to see. They even have an Image of the Day Gallery. Today’s image is very cool.
Here is a great list from Ruby Railways. I actually found the list via Ruby Inside which is one of my favorite Ruby/Rails blogs and it ranks #2 on the list. I guess I am not the only one who appreciates Peter and Hendy’s insights.
So if you are feeling overwhelmed by the number of RoR blogs out there, finally, someone is offering a little clarity so you can scale back your reading list.
By the way, the top 10 list is not subjective. Peter Szinek wrote a script that uses the data from Alexa and Technorati to determine the rankings.
Today I stumbled across this, strange maps. If you have a few minutes (or hours) it is very easy to get caught up in these maps. My favorite is the one that renames US states with countries with a similar GDP. Who would have thought that Morocco and Maine would have anything in common?
A few of us on the FiveRuns Team will be unplugging our Macs and heading to Santa Clara for the MySQL Conference next week. If you are going to the show, come by and say hello. We will be in Booth #620.
If the opportunity to meet some of the team or to see how FiveRuns cuts through the complexity of systems management is not enough to get you to come by, maybe the chance to win a MacBook Pro is. We will be giving away a MacBook Pro to a lucky conference attendee. Sign up at our booth or on our website.
The Washington Post put together an interesting experiment. They convinced Joshua Bell, an internationally acclaimed violin virtuoso, to play his violin at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro stop. Would anyone notice that the street musician playing for money at a subway stop had incredible talent? Would anyone notice that he was playing a 1713 Stradivarius? How much money would he make in 45 minutes?
The results, while not surprising, are a little sad. Most never even glanced at the musician. Some paused. Very few stopped to listen for a while. Watch the video in the article, listen to the music. Hopefully, next time you see or hear something beautiful, you will stop for a moment.
DHH created a firestorm of comments over this posting on Signal vs. Noise the other day. The opposition to the posting was equally split between those who were offended by the use of the ‘f-bomb’ and those who did not agree that offline web apps were unnecessary.
I was more than a little shocked by the vehemence of people’s responses. I thought one of the things people respect about DHH and 37signals is that they are opinionated. Is it that people don’t like opinions expressed so definitively? And by definitively, I mean with an expletive. It seems as though most people missed the content of the post, which was simply the statement of an opinion. Not a call to arms. Not a personal attack.
If this was a calculated move to spark a conversation, then well done! If it happened by chance, all the better. Hopefully, when the dust settles, people can exchange ideas about what web apps they would like to use offline or what book they read the last time they didn’t have WiFi available.
