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ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest Platform
The ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest site launched on November 17, 2009. Here’s a screenshot of the website, which looks pretty cool now that the community has uploaded a bunch of videos.
The purpose of the contest is to help drive up the membership for the Department of State’s ExchangesConnect social network, which is focused on promoting cross-cultural understanding around the world. The social network and the contest have been done for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
This is a project I’ve worked on with fellow Rubyists David McVicar and Kelly Gifford, so we’re all pretty pleased. Four contest winners will receive an all-expense-paid, two-week-long foreign exchange program compliments of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
Check out the contest now! There’s plenty of room for more participants.
Beer and BBQ at RubyNation
Woohoo! My company, MetroStar Systems, has signed up to be RubyNation’s Friday night Happy Hour sponsor, featuring two of the major food groups: Beer and BBQ!
RubyNation Interviews
I was in the studio yesterday with a team of seven volunteers to videotape interviews with people who have helped make RubyNation a reality. Interviewees included: 1) Gray Herter, the chief organizer of RubyNation, 2) myself as a RubyNation organizer, and 3) Johnny Nguyen, Vice President of the New Media Group at MetroStar Systems.
Gray Herter, Chief Organizer of the RubyNation Conference, being interviewed by David Keener in the studio at Arlington Independent Media. Photo by Johnny Nguyen, taken from the production booth.
Grab Networks Lays Off Entire Ruby Team
Grab Networks, the media company known for making news video clips available on the Internet, just laid off their entire Ruby development team yesterday. I worked there myself until midsummer, so I know all of the folks who just got the axe. If your organization is looking for some good Ruby (or Java) developers, check out my Contacts page and send me an email.
Online Video Contest Launches in Two Weeks
Since mid-August, I’ve been working as part of a team to create an online video contest for the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. They operate an online social network called ExchangesConnect that promotes cross-cultural understanding across the world. This is the second year that my company, MetroStar Systems, has implemented and managed an online contest for this client.
A Little Inspiration
I’m always designing things, mostly software programs in one of a couple different languages. When you spend a lot of time doing the same things, it’s easy to slip into a rut without realizing it. Something that I find useful to combat this is to look at interesting designs in other totally unrelated fields.
This is an architectural concept drawing for an “ocean house” that I found on the web (I have no idea where now, because I saved this image a long time ago). I like the image because it challenges the traditional ideas of what a house on the water should look like.
First, there are no wooden stilts in sight. Second, the house isn’t modeled after a sea shanty, a New England fisherman’s cottage, a native hut or anything else. It’s a large, square, two-story modern building rising out of the water, attached to shore by a wooden dock (probably the only traditional element in the image).
Even there, though, the house isn’t perfectly square. The frame is square, but the living quarters are offset diagonally from the frame, creating some interesting angles and shapes, including a triangular wooden deck. The overall effect creates an interesting and thought-provoking architectural design because it challenges the general concept of what a house on the water should look like.
Now, carry that idea of challenging traditional concepts over to the software realm. What concepts are embodied in a project? Can those concepts be bent or twisted in new ways to create something totally different? Can they be combined with something else to make something entirely new?
For example, when blogging became prevalent, the folks at Twitter came up with the novel idea of “micro-blogging” as a way to make blogging more accessible to people who didn’t have the time or inclination to maintain a full-scale blog.
That’s why I like looking at designs in other realms unrelated to software. It’s a way to inspire myself to come at problems from a different angle, to combine things in different ways or sometimes just to play the “what if” game when trying to conceptualize a new project.
Arlington Independent Media
David Keener just signed up for video production courses with Arlington Independent Media (AIM). Their “Studio Production” class begins on October 10, 2009.
RubyNation Web Site Updated
Just finished the latest update to the RubyNation web site. Moved 2009 content into the archive area, and updated the remaining content to reflect the run-up to the next conference in June 2010 (exact date and venue still to be determined). Next step, we’re working on a new look-and-feel, thanks to some help from Don Anderson, graphic artist extraordinaire.
The Online Office
This is the 21st century. We’re several years into the Web 2.0 movement. This should all have an impact on how software development is done.
Frankly, there’s no reason for a software development team to be tied to a particular physical location anymore. A team should be able to collaborate online using online tools. That’s what we set out to do on our current project at MetroStar Systems, where we’re using an agile development methodology to produce an online video contest for the Education and Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Department of State.
Is it really possible for a team to be 100% online? To collaborate using nothing but online tools?
Yes, it is. And I’m going to show you the tools that we used to do it.
Core Applications
Here are the key web-based applications that we’ve adopted as part of our goal of having our team do everything online:
- Acunote: This is a freemium site that allows you to define and track the sprints associated with agile development methodologies. It’s free for a team of up to 5 people, and allows unlimited projects. It’s a great tool, and has rapidly become indispensable.
- EngineYard: This site offers a variety of online tools for managing hosted applications. The company has made a particular investment in supporting the Ruby on Rails community. Their online tools integrate seamlessly with GitHub, allowing releases to be pulled from the source code repository and installed with a single mouse click. Their hosting plans also include GitHub accounts.
- GitHub: GitHub is an online source code repository designed to work well with the git source code management system. Git allows each developer to have a full copy of the project repository. It adds some nifty capabilities for branching, merging and syncing repositories with each other. GitHub adds a number of features on top of the core source code management features, including a wiki, and issue tracking features and code distribution capabilities. Having the wiki is particularly nice, since it allows the team to easily collaborate on documentation (and Gliffy diagrams can be easily embedded into wiki pages).GitHub is free for open source projects. It’s a relatively low-cost option for commercial projects. The Rails community has adopted GitHub en masse. Additionally, if you use a hosting service like EngineYard, a GitHub account may be bundled with the hosting.
- Gliffy: This is a freemium site that provides a variety of online diagramming features. The team has used Gliffy for both conventional diagrams and more specialized diagrams such as Entity-Relationship Diagrams. Gliffy allows diagrams to be exported as graphics; alternately, embed code can be generated so that a diagram can be embedded in a web page, which can be a nice way to add an diagram to a wiki (and the embedded diagram will reflect any updates to the original Gliffy document).The diagramming features are extremely nice. The only downsides of the free version of Gliffy are: 1) you can only have a maximum of 5 documents, 2) the Gliffy logo appears on any generated graphics or embedded diagrams, and 3) all documents are publicly accessible (you have to pay in order to have private documents). It’s definitely a tool that’s worth paying for, though.
- Google Docs: Google provides a variety of would-be online replacements for the applications in Microsoft Office. Well, they may not yet be in a position to make Microsoft Office obsolete, but they’re still pretty effective tools. With Google Docs, users can create documents online and easily share them with other users.
- Screenr: This Java-based tool allows you to quickly and easily create screencasts using your laptop. This is particularly effective with the MacBook Pro, which includes a built-in microphone. Simply activate Screenr, drag a box around the area of the screen that you want to include in the screencast, and start talking. Screenr is a freemium service that will let you do a 5-minute screencast for free. Screencasts can be embedded on web sites or exported as videos. Screenr is excellent for customer demos, particularly for demonstrating web sites in secure locations where no Internet access is allowed.