Last Thursday was the second RubyOnRails conference in the Netherlands. Conveniently, it was four minutes walking from my apartment in Amsterdam. RubyEnRails was organized and sponsored by recruitment companies that have RubyOnRails fever. The main sponsor was Adnexus the company by Brett Dawkins, a very active Dutch RoR scener.

Conference day

The conference was opened by Dr Nic Williams who gave two nice lectures that day. I knew Dr Nic because he has a nice blog and made nice comments about my Shuriken script. It appears Dr Nic is very fond of extending the syntax of Ruby by using 'magic' tricks like methodmissing or constmissing.

There were about 200 people at the conference. There was a mixed audience of PHP developers, Java developers and Sysop gothics. Also there was a fair percentage of recruiters, some of them with no clue. What really surprised me was the low amount of people that had actual production experience with rails. I suspect there weren't more than 20. During the lunch break, Dr Nic even admitted that he codes Java for a living.

Interesting cases

There were two interesting real-life cases nonetheless:

• Wakoopa.com, a 'what software do you use' social networking site by Robert Gaal (blueace.nl)
• Nedap's MovesOnRails, a health-care planning application by the Dutch Devices Factory Corp (Nederlandse Apparatenfabriek).

Also, I had a fruitful conversation with the director of Nedforce, someone who really does have a clue.

Noted techniques

These are some things that I heard and are more or less new to me:

• BackgrounDRB a distrubuted ruby job scheduler for rails
• Asset Packager a rails plugin that compresses your CSS/JavaScript
• multi-page (MovesOnRails) They invented this thing that allows you to navigate your layouts like a book. Still waiting for some code though.

Noted tools

• monit server monitoring tool
• munin server monitoring tool
• pingdom.com server monitoring tool 2.0, with SMS notification which is nice for in Europe
• mailroom a webapp that facilitates mail interaction with team and customers (not quite sure what it is yet, but people like it)

Nintendo Wiiii bakatachiiiiiii :-)

The project is well underway to developing a nice product. Also, as you might see in the below picture, it's kind of fun to use!

Click here to read more and vote for the name

This article is better explained on my new joined entrepreneur blog: digigen.nl

Ok I think I will blog my idea’s more openly. Being afraid that someone might steal it is just stupid, for several reasons. As Clive Thompson correctly points out in the latest Wired businesses are starting to realize the importance of getting naked. Sharing the secrets, mistakes and hardships. Also in the great manifest Getting Real there is this simple equation:

idea can be:

• -10 really dumb
• 1 stupid
• 5 ok
• 10 smart
• 20 excellent

execution can be:

• 1 almost nothing
• 10 bad
• 1000 ok
• 10000 good
• 10000000 excellent

If you multiply these two variables, you will get the amount of cash you earn (in euro’s I recommend).

Confabio.com

This idea is not a 20, but it could be at least a 5. It happened while I was doing two things:

• communicating a lot overseas, for work and private matters
• playing around with my hot sexy black macbook (named burakubuuku) and its cool built-in webcam
• playing around with Adobe flex

This let me to make a little website that does the following:

• Show your head on the screen
• Recording your nasty head and broadcasting it to a Red5 server
• Showing your head again by streaming that same broadcast

Confabio will be as simple as possible. First it was intended to be an arty farty project, but I think it can actually be useful. When a person goes to confabio.com he will see his own video. When another internet user opens confabio.com a second video-stream will be displayed, a third, fourth and so on. Of course, the more people join, the smaller the screens become.

I haven’t really looked at so-called competitors yet and I don’t intend to. The only features I’m willing to add is:

• displaying your location discretely under your video-stream
• having tags/channels/rooms: confabio.com/dominiek_room, confabio.com/cooking

Techniques

Mochiron I will use RubyOnRails, but most of the stuff I will need to use flash for.

• RubyOnRails will facilitate metadata to swf: geo-location information, IP
• RubyOnRails will use the weborb plugin to facilitate serverside data facilities for the swf app
• Adobe Flex will be used to compile .swf files (using .as, .mxml and .css files)
• Red5 is a Java server that facilitates video play/publish streams (Note: I really hate this piece of software because it solves a solution and not a problem, checkout these 5 pages hello world)
• Adobe Flash Player > 8 is needed in order to access microphone and webcam

Why will Confabio.com work?

I don’t know and I shouldn’t care. Primary focus should be: getting this working and actually start using it. The factors that could make the execution a success:

• Simplicity, this is relatively not-complex as long as we don’t add too much features
• the need to use it, I really need a tool like this so I will start using my own product

Why will Confabio.com not work?

There is no business-model yet, and I think a nice extra in this project will be a bandwidth monitor to project expenses. Also, we need a good design and perhaps a better name.