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Better late than never—here are the slides and the code from the The Renegades Guide to Hacking Rails Internals, the RailsConf Europe 2008 Tutorial given by Pradeep Elankumaran & Michael Bleigh.

Click here to download

Sorry about the delay—the files have also been uploaded to the RailsConf Europe website, though we are not sure when that site will be updated.

Last week, along with a few of my Intridea colleagues, I had the opportunity to experience two entirely different Ruby-related conferences. The first was RailsConf Europe, an international Ruby on Rails conference in Berlin Germany. After giving our RCE talks, Pradeep and I got on planes and flew to Austin, TX for the Lone Star Ruby Conference, where Intridea presented a full-day training session. Both conferences had their own unique feel, and it was interesting to compare the community eco-systems inherent in each.

At RailsConf Europe, Intridea had two talks accepted – Michael and Pradeep gave a tutorial on Rails Internals, and Michael and I presented a talk and coding session on Mid-End Rails Development. For our talk, the crowd was attentive, but very quiet. Generally when speaking in a packed room, there will be a quiet rumble as attendees comment on the ongoing presentation. The entire event had more of a formal feeling to it. This could perhaps be due to the language barrier brought on by attendees from all over Europe, the US, and the world coming together – but it was a departure from my other presentation experiences.

Likely related to the varied backgrounds, the RailsConf Europe crowd did not seem to be very cohesive – there appeared to be fewer hallway hack sessions and in-depth discussion that you often find at similar events. The venue also contributed to lack of cohesion. The hotel did not offer breakfast, so attendees didn’t have that early morning mingling that usually occurs. Being held in a hotel in downtown Berlin, there were also many potential distractions. A quick nap in the room, a run out to the street corner bratwurst vendor, a wide variety of local pubs – there were many opportunities to be drawn away from the conference.

Because of the variety of backgrounds, along with the number of distractions, the community feel seemed to be a bit lacking.

The Lone Star Ruby Conference was an entirely different experience, I think a large part due to the venue. At LSRC, the venue was not attached to a hotel, all meals were provided, events were scheduled from morning until night, and there was not a great deal to do within walking distance of the venue – not to mention it was almost too hot to go outside! All of these contributed to a more cohesive group that grew even stronger as the event went on.

Adam, Pradeep, and I presented our full-day training – Rails Refactoring: Triage, Prevention, and Performance – to a great group of developers. Having just come from RCE, where people were from all over, it was different to have a class full of people mostly from the same geographic area (Texas). Perhaps the nature of a training vs a session, but there was much more communication going on between attendees and instructors. The vibe was definitely more laid back.

That vibe extended to the rest of the event – there were lots of hallway hacking sessions, people helping other developers with code problems, and many in-depth technical discussions outside of the actual talks.

Overall, both events offered some great technical talks and the opportunity to meet some great Ruby/Rails minds – but for a community feel, Lone Star wins hands-down.

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Last night when Yammer won the TechCrunch50, our interest was more than a little piqued. Today we’re officially taking the wraps off of Present.ly, our “Twitter for Businesses” product that we’ve been working on in stealth mode for the last several months and are launching on September 16 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

It’s great to see that short-form communication for businesses is so promising as to win top honors at such a competitive conference. We’re extremely passionate about the field because it has the potential to really transform how people communicate inside an organization. So congratulations are in order to the Yammer team for bringing so much exposure to the field.

One of the reasons that we were so surprised to see Yammer among the TechCrunch50 is because Present.ly was submitted to be included as well! Unfortunately, we never got the chance to demo our product for the TC50 experts (something that was supposed to be part of the process). We didn’t receive a clear response back as to why, but it would have been great to have the chance to go head-to-head with Yammer in the preliminaries of TechCrunch50 or on stage at the conference.

It’s Still On, Though

Be that as it may, it’s certainly been a shot of adrenaline for our team to have a surprise competitor mere days before we are set to launch. We’ve had some time to examine Yammer, and we’re ready for some competition! So how do they stack up against each other?

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Collaboration: Present.ly has hash tags, like Yammer. But it also has groups, private messaging, and media/file sharing built in. We built Present.ly from the ground up to have powerful features tailored specifically for business use. Present.ly accounts can also be extended beyond a single e-mail domain, allowing you to include clients, consultants and other collaborators effortlessly.

Platform Approach: Starting from day one Present.ly has an API that is fully compatible with the Twitter REST API. This means that existing Twitter applications can work instantly with Present.ly with almost no modification. Through the API, Present.ly can easily integrate with all parts of your business.

The Power of Context: Present.ly automatically analyzes each post for context, automatically separating out questions, replies, and urgent messages. Our robust notifications system allows you to receive updates via E-Mail, SMS, and IM based on this context.

We’re really proud of Present.ly and think that it can enable great new things for companies of all sizes, from 5 employees to 50,000. On September 16, get ready to start using the REAL Twitter for Business.

It’s been a busy week at Intridea. Michael, Pradeep, and Chris presented a couple of talks in Berlin. Then, Chris and Pradeep met up with Adam in Austin, Texas for a full-day training session. Back in our DC headquarters, I was one of the panelists for the Future of Software event organized by Potomac Tech Wire. Japan and China next year? We are definitely getting our name around.

The Future of Software event was attended by over 200 tech executives in the area. The discussion revolved around technology trends, business model implications, and funding software companies. There was a lot of discussion on open-source and software as service (SaaS) models destroying the lucrative, traditional perpetual license models. I was really surprised by how much discussion we had on Ruby On Rails (and I didn’t even have to start it!), both among the panelists and the audience. It’s nice to know that ROR is hot in this area flooded with defense contractors.

Here are some of my thoughts I prepared for the meeting:

Three Software Trends

Cheap, easy-to-use consumer software will continue to make in-roads into the business world. Google Apps in the enterprise will fundamentally change the way we collaborate inside the companies as well as personal life (e.g. Gmail, Calendar, GChat, Apps, Sites, etc)

Building applications on top of open platforms with existing user bases will continue (e.g. iPhone Apps, OpenSocial, Facebook apps, Linkedin). Innovation and the killer apps come from the development community rather than the platform companies. It’s still hard to make money on these platforms.

Software as Service is finally taking off (Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, ...). Even small companies can buy enterprise software.

Commoditization & Business Models

Commoditization is inevitable. Companies will need to aggressively focus on customer value and innovate more rapidly.

Software as Service is finally taking off (Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, ...). Even small companies like us can buy enterprise software like SalesForce.

The freemium model is also popular on the web. You attract the users with the free version and then upsell them through value-added features.

Servicing open-source apps is great way for new companies to compete with the large companies. Even using this approach you need lot of energy to promote the technology, build a multi-vendor eco-system, and convert the leads into sales.

Fate of big software companies (Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, etc) in 10 years:

Ten years is a long time in software business. Probably a couple of players will be still very strong. Probably 25% will fail. The remaining players will not be so dominant. They will continue to survive through acquisition of innovative companies. New leaders will emerge. Second comings like Apple are going to be rare.

Advice to new startups:

Don't under-estimate the need for marketing and sales. After your initial beta launch, the interest will wane. You have to promote the product pretty heavily to get the traction you wanted. It will take time to succeed. Ideas are cheap and execution is hard.

Find a business partner. Start-ups can be a roller coaster ride, it helps to have someone to brainstorm ideas and to share the ups and downs.

I think entrepreneurship is the best way to compete in the global marketplace.

Greetings from blazing hot Austin, TX where Chris, Adam & I are attending Lone Star RubyConf 2008. We gave the Rails Refactoring—Triage, Prevention & Performance tutorial yesterday to about 25 attendees of the conference, which was quite exciting and enjoyable.

Personally, I really like the small regional-conference feel of Lone Star RubyConf. The ambiance is much more laid-back than the two Railsconfs and networking is effortless. It doesn’t hurt that the conference is located in Austin, which is a real foodie heaven (especially barbeque), with a very cool and friendly Ruby/Rails community.

This year, the conference seems to have attracted a good set of speakers—I saw many prominent Rubyists walking the halls, and talking to many of the speakers was quite informative. Matz is here, and we’ve taken to thanking him for Ruby every time we’ve run into him in the hallway, which is honestly the least we could do without feeling like stalkers.

Highly recommended if you’re thinking of attending next year.

Michael Bleigh and Chris Selmer gave a talk at RailsConf Europe 2008 entitled “Hacking the Mid-End: Advanced Rails UI Techniques.” If you had a chance to attend, please take a moment to evaluate the session. If not, hopefully this post will help you understand a bit of what you missed!

This talk was aimed at being an introduction to the role of a mid-end developer; someone who facilitates the back-end and front-end developers and also writes the javascript interaction layer using Unobtrusive Scripting. You can view the slides embedded below, or you can download the slide deck directly.

The Rails app that we developed during the talk is available on GitHub with all of the completed code. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks to everyone who came and saw the talk!

Greetings from still sunny Berlin, where Michael & I wrapped up our Hacking Rails Internals talk yesterday. We would love to hear comments from those who attended—we are actively working on getting the slides and demo code to you as soon as possible. Please rate our session if you did attend, so that we can get some constructive feedback.

Today, Chris & Michael will be presenting Hacking the Mid-End : Unobtrusive Scripting & Advanced UI Techniques in Rails. This 45-minute talk will be a discussion of the “Mid-End”—advanced user interface problems that don’t fit the traditional ‘back-end’ and ‘front-end’ categorization. You can find more details on the RailsConf site.

Chris & I will also be flying out today from Berlin to Austin, TX for the Lonestar RubyConf. Along with Adam Bair, we’re giving a 6-hour mid-level training session on refactoring Rails apps. We will be talking about how to effectively rescue horrid codebases, prevent your codebase from turning into a monster and performance issues—we’re quite excited.

While we’re sad to leave Berlin so quickly—we got the chance to checkout some excellent street food in the city. Next time you’re in Berlin, give yourself a break for one night from expensive restaurants and indulge in Doner Kababs and Bratwurst (usually found with a few blocks of your hotel). Highly recommended. We also saw some yellow watermelon, but that’s not much of a story.

Michael will be here in Berlin till the end of the conference on Thursday—please come say hello if you can at either conference!

Chris, Michael & I are at sunny/rainy Berlin, Germany at Railsconf Europe 2008. This year, the conference is being held at the Maritim proArte Hotel right in the middle of Downtown Berlin. Great food and interesting people around—we’re looking forward to speaking at the conference tomorrow and the day after.

If you’re attending the RailsConf tutorials, come see Michael & I speak tomorrow (Sept. 2, 2008) about hacking and tweaking the Rails internals for your project’s benefits. We have a nice mixup of slides and livecoding sessions ready, and will be running through some hardcore Rails internals material including the Rails class loader and the ever-confusing Routes implementation.

Chris & I will be attending Bratwurst on Rails, so if you would like to meetup, find us there. Bratwurst On Rails

Stay tuned for more coverage of Railsconf Europe and Lonestar RubyConf!