Wow, this is an amazing conf. So much fun. Super well organized. Awesome people. Great food. Lots of crazy hackers creating amazing stuff. JavaScript is on the precipice of exploding into the mainstream for desktop, server and, of course, mobile development.
Nitobi Hack Day is happening on Feb 7, 2009 from 10am to 6pm. (We’re rescheduling to avoid conflict with Ruby in the Rain.)
This is not a contest: it is a competition however. And the competition is fierce. Show up early and your chances of success are less than a startup finding funding in Vancouver (ha ha ha). Just kidding. Late arrivals are welcome!
The event is meant to bring hackers from around Vancouver to the Nitobi office and dedicate a day to building something kick ass. Hacks can be hardware based. Software based. Or (even better) both. We ask that self aware systems do not sport armed weapons. Weapons are cool: but lets keep it safe folks. For example, if you build a robot with a flamethrower face please ensure the flamethrowing face is not active (in our office). Your cooperation is appreciated!!!
A big theme at Nitobi lately has been casual gaming and mobile applications. We don’t want to weight your thinking but special consideration will likely be given to apps utilizing CUI, PhoneGap and/or people who bring bottles of scotch.
Nitobi will provide the foosball, beer, prizes (like books, shirts, software and an IPod Nano) and you provide the hax0r skillz.
Be there!
Remarkably I accomplished nearly everything on my list of goals for 2008 in some form. Rather than subjecting you to a boring recap of my personal minutia here’s what I hope to achieve this year.
Having not done a prediction post before it should come as no surprise I was mostly wrong. But it is always interesting to look back:
The price of music (and media in general) continues to slide to $0. Dvd, hd-dvd, bluray and cd sales plummet.
Interesting that I was thinking about the price of media considering I only started buying it again recently due to an Apple TV purchase. Is it cheaper? I guess so. Lame prediction.
New revenue models will emerge for traditional media and information. Not just advertising.
Also a lame prediction. Micro-payments. Subscriptions. Merchandising. Still around. Not interesting. Staying alive with a good product and valuable services is interesting.
Marketing via Alternate Reality Games becomes more common.
Nope. Though the idea is still valid. Though Akoha comes to mind which does make this a somewhat accurate prediction.
User experience gets more attention, in particular Interaction Design, and Flow.
Probably. I know that the user experience is the top priority at Nitobi. We’ll be out in force at IxDA 09 conveniently here in Vancouver this year.
Low level cloud services continue to grow enabling one click infinitely scalable deployment of web applications. An area pioneered by Amazon we will see Microsoft, Yahoo and Google enter the fray lowering the cost to developers. Mozilla could be a dark horse here.
No real Yahoo offering yet (though they do have the most comprehensive suite of web services going). Microsoft has entered the fray as has the venerable Google. Neither is even close to the level of sophistication of Amazon’s offering. I was mostly right on this one.
Sustainability and climate change will become hazy platforms for polarized debate. The earth will continue to warm.
Guess so, though it is pretty fucking cold outside.
Canucks make the third round of the playoffs.
Wrong. *facepalm*
The mobile web gets a large following via microblogging tools and technology. Twitter gets acquired. Pownce releases an updated ATOM API with oAuth.
Well, Pownce was ‘acquired’ and Twitter is at least talking about oAuth. No idea how I related this to the mobile web but microblogging darlings Twitter and Tumblr are perfect mobile web citizens. (Runners up: Flickr and Facebook.)
AIR gets acceptance but doesn’t grow as quickly as Adobe expects. Changes to the security model sometime this summer will help.
Not sure what the AIR adoption has been but Nitobi is working on two AIR apps and we have plans for more. Cross platform web style dev with native functionality? Yes pls.
Silverlight fails. (It won’t go away but it will continue to suck.)
Nailed it.
APML, OpenID 2.0 and Attribute Exchange gain acceptance.
Sadly: not yet.
Dynamic languages continue to flourish; becoming acceptable glue for java and .net vms. People, like me, will roll their eyes and yawn.
Yes, I think this one is mostly accurate. The hindsight is wonderful. What an arrogant prick I can be.
The .NET community continues to totally misrepresent the concepts of REST and DSL’s with their new MVC (blatant shit ripoff) Framework.
Alright. Alright. This is more of an angry opinion than any sort of prediction. ASP MVC is apparently quite nice if you’re into that sort of thing.
Web services continue to fail. REST and ATOM (guised perhaps as GData) continue to succeed and grow. Techniques for offline / batch processing emerge.
Interesting, I forgot this was a problem we were looking at solving last year. RESTful batch processing is not in my personal list of ’solved’ problems. We’ve had some success with offline sync but this too will become a bigger issue in the future.
Java popularity rises while Mono’s shrinks
This is really hard to judge without creating some junk charts with subjective data. Instead, I’ll leave with my subjective opinion. The JVM is the way to go considering tooling, libs, portability and footprint. Otherwise Mono is pretty cool.
Ok. So, this is so fucking awesome it hurts. We just received a mystery gift from… well, we haven’t figured that part out yet.
Inside the box was this porcelain unicorn (fuck yes), a picture of yours truly with my hair as a bird (inspired by the classic Nick Cage image) and this message:
The binary below decodes to ‘leroux’ (my last name) making the front of the message read:
please leave with leroux
The image is from the epic gastown sno ball fight (which was five days ago). Some of the letters are glued on and some are taped on. Yes I am researching civilian fingerprint analysis techniques.
The message on the back (characters circled in our Nitobi component minified javascript) reads:
merry Christma5; hohoho00; respect tO nitobi buil7 for people;
And a Merry Christmas to you mystery hacker.. this is gotta be someone I’ve gotten into some heavy alternate reality game discussions with. There was a receipt in the box from buffalo new york though I would not put it past a person who took the time to construct this magnificent and humbling gift to have the item shipped around a little to throw me off the trail (and *really* fuck with me).
Will more clues emerge?
UPDATE: received a mystery text message after publishing this:
And sure enough the mailing address had more binary reading:
a special message for you…
They responded to my query of “who is this????!!!!” with “look outside”. I went outside and recieved a text “made you look”. Fucking rad!
Nitobi People
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=hDtdHrW83RGsRqkiBRNMsA
Nitobi Company and Products
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=phonegap+OR+nitobi+OR+cui
Gastown Bars
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=pjYc8La83RGl8_zTbbsjiw
Slick!
The first MerbCamp went down in San Diego this past weekend and Nitobi joined the fray in force by sending four Ruby hackers and as an awesome sponsor. 
Brock Whitten (aka sintaxi), Rob Ellis (aka silentrob), Joe Bowser (aka infil00p) and I (aka brianleroux) arrived in sunny San Diego on thursday evening. After a good nights sleep, we dispatched to the Merb Sprint to help the guys get Merb 1.0RC ready for prime time.
I’m not entirely sure I personally was much help; but we did uncover bugs and tested for new ones. First impression: the Merb core is a solid group of guys. They care about a quality release before anything else and a quality release is bug free and simple for anyone to get up and running quickly.
What I do know is that I learned a tonne. I was a real treat to pick up Merb from the guys who are authoring it. Not so much about Ruby, how to or anything. I learned about the motives and philosphy behind Merb. The Merb opinion, if you will.
Merb is the evolution of opinionated software popularized by Rails. While Merb does possess very strong opinions they remain weakly held. Its about optional opinion and future proofing technology. Sure, you can be up and running with a default Merb stack in couple of minutes (and build yourself a shitty blog in another three). If you don’t share an opinion about the choice of ORM, templating or JavaScript technology (or any aspect of Merb actually) it is easily customized, extracted or supplanted.
Opinion, practice and technology change. The variability of change is the only constant in technology development we can depend on. The flaw with the Ruby on Rails framework is that opinions do not scale. Choosing a technology or approach and prescribing to it wholly is choosing maintenance hell if not historical obscurity. Enabling software for change and evolution is future proofing it. This is not about convention over configuration. We can have convention, less configuration and options at the same time. Merb is on the path to achieving a Ruby web framework that does this.
The first key architectural choice in Merb is that absolutely everything is a gem. This enables some rather obvious benefits of package, dependency management and of course a unified distribution model. Merb is innovating here utilizing the concept of a meta-gem which is just an empty gem with dependencies for merb-core, merb-more, etc. I’m expecting this concept will influence future versions of RubyGems.
The second critical architectural choice is a supported Public API and event hooks for extending and integrating directly into Merb. Adding functionality via monkey patching is powerful and utilized extensively by Rails. However, monkey patching (and alias_method_chain) is a slippery slope that falls into the dark pit of unexpected consequences; It leads to mysterious behavior violating the principle of least surprise and, as an effect, collaborative extension and maintainability becomes increasingly difficult. Having a supported public api that the core development team is committed to maintaining enables extension and integration in a sane and maintainable way.
Having absorbed all this. I promptly returned to our hotel and started pouring over Merb’s code. Well, I might have had a few beers first, but seriously: read that code. Merb’s codebase chooses clarity over cleverness. No fucked up metaprogramming backflip nijitsu (perhaps a little bit but its well documented: mime.rb for example). Well documented. Clearly organized. It is some of the very best Ruby code I’ve had the pleasure of looking through. I came to Merb largely at Brock’s encouragement and its internalized attention to performance. I’m staying for the readable code and philosophy.
Others have done the blow by blow blogging and, I personally twittered the shit out of each session, so I’ll spare you the nitty gritty details of everything. On a higher level: this was one of the very best organized events I’ve attended. The wifi was strong but if that wasn’t enough the venue had drops for power and ethernet (and of course Joe had a lan cable) in every single seat. Each presentation was streamed live. IRC was packed. The lunches where great. The swag kicked ass (tshirt, flipflops AND a frisbee). The content of each session was meaty and everyone speaking was candid, open and genuine. Awesome? Yeah man. Awesome.
Thanks MerbCamp. We’ll see you next year.
Nothing beats a cool beer (or perhaps a delicious scotch) on the patio in the summertime. Come join the Nitobi hackers on the patio between Shebeen room and the Irish Heather this Thursday (July 10, 2008). We’ll be up to our usual tricks: discussing the latest technology with a fresh perspective.
My wallet and phone were stolen from the YWCA gym right out of my locker. The thief must have used bolt cutters when nobody was around. It was a real disappointment but the staff where helpful and after hours on various automated systems I had a police case number, my credit cards canceled and my phone locked so nobody could make long distance calls.
The bank was helpful and sympathetic. The credit card companies took it upon themselves to call me and the police to follow up about fraudulent charge attempts.
However, Rogers Wireless left me feeling like shit.
I called Rogers Wireless that night and they assured me the phone was locked so no calls could be made and to just go to a store the next day and they would help me get a new phone and SIM card. When I arrived at the store they told me I had to purchase the new phone and renew (thus extend) my contact. ‘This was not the impression the agent on the phone gave me.’, I said and they responded, ‘Those guys are retards. We only their sell phones. We’re like a car dealership.’. I’m not kidding you. That is what a retailer, with the Rogers sign and exclusively Rogers products told me. Those guys are retards? They had the good nature to call customer service on my behalf and things degraded to, ‘Its your own fault your phone was stolen SIR, not ours’. I felt like I was being scolded for even thinking they were going to help. I bought a new SIM card deciding I’d find a phone on my own and the agent hesitantly informed me, ‘uuuhhh, your phone was never locked’. I called customer service again and the agent sneered ‘those retailer people don’t know what they’re talking about.’ No long distance calls on my phone, at least.
I walked out tired, angry and disappointed. Negative and poisonous.
This incident represents an epic failure of a brand experience. The people in the store and on the phone represented a confidence destroying lack of professionalism and complete disregard for my misfortune. As a customer I, perhaps naively, expected to be treated better than that.
With complex pyramid scheme like plans, disparate messaging, disregard for the customer and belligerent employee hubris I doubt Rogers Wireless can continue to be a success as more companies enter into the wireless space. As a human being first and a consumer second I am now actively seeking better options.