Wadomo Inc.
The Agile Company
Browsing to the future
May 28th
One of my favorite things about Ruby on Rails is the Convention Over Configuration principle. Everybody works in the same fashion, applying the same techniques and trying to keep the same pace with the community.
But when we talk about Ruby frameworks there are two mayor candidates: Rails and Merb.
Both of them with some pros and cons, but equally powerful and with very strong motivated communities around them.
Rails is focused on rapid and agile development for web developers, while Merb is focused on speed and extensibility and it’s totally ORM agnostic while Rails comes packaged with Active Record.
Why not take the best features of each framework and merge them together?
Well that’s what Rails 3 is about, and It’s gonna be awesome, there are a bunch of new features already being polished and getting ready to rock the world.
If you want to know what it’s gonna taste, check out this great Webcast from O’Reilly guys. Quite long but totally worth it.
So if you want to give Rails 3 a early try just need to run this two commands:
gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n
gem install rails --pre
And you are ready to go!
Another new and exciting world that we are already exploring is the new capabilities of HTML5. In Wadomo we believe that HTML5 it’s gonna be a game changer. We are just starting to realize all the new possibilities that this language will give us to make the Web a bettter place.
If you don’t now what this HTML5 thing is about, why don’t check out some examples?
And the best it’s yet to come! Rails3 will have all its templates with HTML5 doctype. Nice!
LOL Sounds
May 21st
We would like to present our first webOS app: LOL Sounds!
It’s simple. Just a lot of funny sounds, ready to be pushed and make more funny your parties!
We are waiting for your proposals. We’ll update with new sounds every week.
Enjoy it!
Balsamiq, Interface design for dummies
May 12th
The Agile philosophy tell us that we should deliver new releases of our software as often as possible, normally within 2-5 week sprints. Frameworks such as Ruby On Rails allow us to deliver this speed programming, but we need to have a thorough understanding of what is to be delivered first.
Balsamiq allow us to design interfaces at speed light, let them be websites, mobile apps, desktop apps or whatever you need. We can then check with the client/team both the look of the app and the flows, get early feedback and make changes at almost zero cost.
One interesting thing about balsamic is that is a very small company, and they have no intention of growing indefinitely. They define themselves as a “a 5-star restaurant on the web…a small, family run, lasts for generations, really top quality stuff, small group, lots of happy customers”.
Wadomo has been supporting balsamic since its early days, and we will probably continue working them in the future because we support good software. Good job!
¨On June 2008, Peldi Guilizzoni launched Balsamiq, a one-man software company that helps people create quick / intuitive mockups. 3 Weeks later, his revenue was $4,432. In less than 5 months, he reached $100,000. 18 Months later, he crossed the $2M Mark.¨
Here is an interview with his founder, Peldi Guilizoni, by Andrew Warner from mixergy. Hope you guys enjoy it!
Motivational Readings
Apr 30th
Starting a company can become quite challenging. Not only you have to keep yourself updated with your industry’s latest news but also you have to deal with all kind of unexpected situations, some of them way too far from your own field of expertise.
When times are tough, keeping yourself motivated is not an easy task. In fact, it can become the real challenge. Fortunately, there are some classics you can rely on those moments of weakness.
Founders at work
Jessica Livingston, Apress
This books contains a series of interviews with the founders of some of the most successful companies nowadays. Apple, Hotmail, Paypal… you might see them as celebrities today, but at some point they were just some geeks in a garage with a vision.
What did it take to make those visions true it’s what this book is about. It’s full of mistakes, advices, success (and failure) stories that I feel really empowering.
Here are some passages I found specially interesting
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.
-Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple
If you want to shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is. It’s the same with introducing technology.
-Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems
The art of the Start
Guy Kawasaky, Portfolio
This is probably the book that made me want to start my own company.
It gives an excellent starting point to start a business. And when I say starting point, I mean the right state of mind and the right motivation.
This books is full of practical advices, such as:
Make meaning: Create a product that will make the wold a better place
Get Going: Don’t spend too much time on planning and start delivering your product.
Find some soulmates: Build a team that shares your vision and complement your weaknesses with their strengths. Behind every Steve Jobs is a Steve Wozniak
This book is so full of awesome advices and it’s so simple to read and understand that it’s impossible not loving it.
Let’s hear the Guy.
jQuery geographical data autocompleter in Rails
Apr 22nd
In Wadomo, we enforce writting reusable code when possible. This means that we can use it in our future projects, but also that all the developers out there can use it and improve it at the same time. Win-win situation that has been the base for the open source community since the early days.
A common problem that arises within web projects is how to save geographical data about our users. We always like to know where users are located, so we can target them with more localized information and recommendations.
Our goal was to easily add this information in our views, and to be able to have an autocomplete field with all the cities in the world with just one html tag, simple and clean.
Long time ago, we used to create big, annoying and unmaintainable relational tables in our databases, trying to solve this problem. Now, we can use some of the online services that companies like Google or Yahoo offers. After testing some of these services, we decided to use Yahoo Geo and we are very pleased about the obtained results.
To make our life easier, we have developed a Ruby on Rails plugin, and of course you can use it too! This plugin will include jQuery in your project (if you haven’t done it yet) so please make sure that you are not using Prototype, because it could create conflicts with your code.
The first thing that you have to do is register yourself in Yahoo Geo for an API_KEY. After that, you’re ready to install our plugin.
Using a console, go to your rails app dir and type:
script/plugin install git://github.com/wadomo/geo_yahoo.git
Now, check if you have included the default javascript files in your layout. If don’t, include this line in your views layaout:
<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
The last thing, is add your API_KEY in your config/environment.rb file. Be sure that you include this line just before the last “end” of the file.
ENV['YAHOO_API'] = "yourapikeyhere"
That’s it! You’ve got it!
Now, let’s use it. Just include in your view
<p>
<%= text_field_tag :city_autocomplete,"" %>
<%= hidden_field_tag :country %>
<%= hidden_field_tag :state %>
<%= hidden_field_tag :city %>
<%= geo_autocomplete "city_autocomplete",[:city,:country,:state] %>
</p>
This will create an input text that, while you are typing, will update a div with the results. When you select one, it will update the 3 hidden fields (wich have to be the same names as your model attributes) with the separated result of the request.
We would love some feedback about this, so just check it out and let us know what do you think about it. We promise that we will keep it updated.
Stay tuned, we will publish new plugins soon!
coincide
Agile Project Management
Apr 15th
Starting a company is awesome. When you start from scratch, you get a clean shot to decide what you like, get rid of all those things you hate, and start using what you know will improve your productivity. Your Rules, your way.
At Wadomo we have to handle several projects concurrently, from different places around the globe and for various kinds of projects. This task is unmanageable without the aid of a good project management tool and we have tried plenty of them. Some Project Management tools such as Microsoft Project or JIRA were too rigid and data-oriented; Others like Basecamp or Scrum´d have a much open approach to project management. Neither made us totally happy.
Pivotal Tracker
For us, being a software company, we love trying and testing software. We love making good software, and we certainly appreciate when others do it right. We are early adopters, trend seekers and efficiency consultants. For project management, we must confess, Pivotal labs is the absolute winner.
Facing a strong competition, it´s kind of tough to find some features that can differentiate your product enough to get people straight away. Pivotal labs have created such a comfortable interface that we can keep pivotal tracker running in a tab all day long without bothering us.
Agile Methodology. In Wadomo, we have plenty of experience handling projects. We have launched social products for telecom operators, backoffice high performance products for Investment Banks and even security audits for the Police Department.
Nonetheless, we do believe there is room for Agile methodologies, but you need to know what you are doing. Pivotal allows you to focus on your work, while they focus on keeping the information in place.
Interface. They set up a beautiful ajax interface where you can create your tasks, estimate the effort, assign them to a member and start using pivotal. Drag&Drop, Panel view, Tabs listings… they made a desktop-app-looking-web without using flex. Brilliant
Velocity Prediction. After a few weeks using pivotal, your team’s velocity will become more and more stable. Pivotal Tracker will use this information to predict how many points you are going to acomplish in your sprint. This allows pivotal to tell you what functionalities are going to be available in the next release. We love it, and our clients love that too
Tool Integration. We use pivotal as a bugTracker software as well. We have a snapabug account and it inserts a widget in our testing environment for some projects. When clients insert bugs from the widget, it automatically updates our pivotal and allow us to keep track of what to look at. Simple, clean, beautiful.
Here is a quick introduction of this awesome tool.
Towards Non Relational Databases
Apr 4th
Most actual web applications rely on features that are not compatible with classic relational databases, which are based on these characteristics:
- simplicity
- robustness
- performance
- scalability
- compatibility
The RDBMS’s weak feature for the new kind of web applications is scalability. Web 2.0 oriented applications, which requires a high write capability and on-demand scalability, don’t fetch in RDBMS the answers at their basic requirements:
- horizontally scalability: allow to add new nodes at database layer as number of users grows up.
- weak data schema, that enables rapid development as dynamic languages allows quick changes in logic layer.
- add new nodes without requiring to stop the service.
NoSQL (Not only SQL, or No SQL) is the name that covers the new attemps of provide a high scalable database for web applications. These new databases can be defined by two main characteristics:
- cloud/non-cloud service: showing if the service is provided or not as ”Software as a service”.
- structure: Pair Key-value, Wide Column Store, Graph databases or document oriented databases.
| Cloud Service | Non-cloud Service | |
|---|---|---|
| Key-Value | SimpleDB | Voldemort |
| Google AppEngine DataStore | Redis | |
| Wide Column Store | Hadoop | |
| Cassandra | ||
| Hypertable | ||
| Document Store | MongoDB | |
| CouchDB | ||
| Graph Database | Neo4J |
Main social networks are already taking advance of these new approaches of databases:
Currently there are two main events that covers NoSQL:
- NoSQL meetup at San Francisco: http://nosql.eventbrite.com/
- NoSQL meetup at London: http://nosqleu.com/
Web apps meets mobile
Mar 28th
Let’s face it, mobile applications are here to stay, and that is a good thing!
Whether you are carrying a brand new IPhone, the last Blackberry from the market, or your old and trusty Palm, you want your device to be able to handle all kind of stuff. As a developer you want to be able to reach all those new and exciting markets, and provide the same services and solutions as your web applications does.
But it’s not always that easy. A mobile device it’s not like the web.
For starters you have to take into consideration the amount of information you will be displaying; You have to tweak your interface to make it easy to use with probably just one thumb, and there are memory and browser limitations to make it even more complex. On top of that, you’ll probably have to master a couple of new coding languages, which might take some time!.
And, as a coder, you’re anxious to bring your new piece of software to your users.
So what can we do about this?
At Wadomo we love Ruby on Rails. Yes, there are a bunch of languages out there, but we just have found in Ruby on Rails it’s the best match for our scrum-based philosophy:
Design right, code nice, change fast, painless deployment and awesome results!
If you don’t know about Scrum, this is what you are missing
So, if you use Ruby on Rails and you want to give your web application a mobile interface, you might want to check out mobile_fu.
This is a really great plugin. It just take literally a couple lines of code to get it working and it will detect when a mobile device it’s browsing your application. This way you can code your views and your CSS according to the devices you might want to support. Now your application rocks!
But if you WAnt to DO MOre, and you want to go the extra mile, there are a couple of solutions out there that will make your web app looks like a native application:
The iui project or JQTouch library will make your application to look like a native IPhone app without the pain of going through all the revisions of the Apple guys (no offense, we all love Apple here)
That’s it, go get there and give your web applications a nice and awesome mobile look!
Hello World
Mar 17th
Nobody said starting was easy. In fact, starting might be the hardest of all, specially when you are starting your own business.
How does it all start?
It all sparks when you are very young, usually by realizing you have a different nature to everyone else; If you were the one who:
- Organized parties at school,
- Join everyone for a football tournaments,
- Fund raise for the prom dance
- Found side projects to keep you busy on the weekends
and anything that required some creativity and a few hours outside of class, then you might be part of this breed.
College Stage
While in university, things for you don’t get better. Where your friends see yet another boring assignment in programming class, you see a new business idea that could change the world. Your parents never stop nagging you to keep on studying, and the little daemon on your shoulder tells you to leave everything behind and follow your dreams. At some point you just need to accept it and deal with it. You are a different breed, you are an entrepreneur.
During your life you will probably meet a lot of people. People you learn from, people you admire, people that help you, people you rather haven’t met… but the important thing is that you get to meet people in your same wavelength (really, they do exist), and when that happens you will have to work hard not to deny the truth and let the inevitable happen; you will start a company together. And there’s where we are now.
The Leap
WaDoMo is created by four entrepreneurs, whose life’s crossed to decide they WAnted to DO MOre. Our objective is to develop all those ideas that we think can change people’s lifes, with an agile and realistic approach. Stop wasting our time doing things that have no use. Let’s start doing more. And that is exactly what this blog is about.
So if you feel identified with what you’ve read so far, we hope you stay tuned because there’s lots more to come.
