If you haven't heard of Ignite, google it in your city now! I moonlight as an organizer for Ignite San Francisco,...

The New York Times Hack Day event this past weekend was incredible fun and a great success. We had an amazing time participating at the New York Times Science Fair last month, and were really honored to be invited back

Looks like we can’t get enough of the New York Times. After a spectacular day at the New York Times Open Source Science Fair last month, we’re headed...

This past weekend I participated in Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hosted by the OpenGov Hub in DC. I was extra excited this time around because RHoK was being held alongside the first ever Sanitation Hackathon, an event that tries to find technological solutions to some of the very serious sanitation problems around the world.

On Nov 15, a strange species known as “Intrideans” descended upon Manhattan. Armed with posterboard, sticky tape,...

Last weekend I had the opportunity to speak at RubyConf 2012 about a topic that is very exciting to me: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). CORS allows for true cross-domain AJAX in the browser which, while simple in concept, is powerful in potential.

Hello Manhattan! We’re thrilled to be taking part as an exhibitor at the NYTimes Open Source Science Fair...

Given this is my first European conference, it's challenging not to be overwhelmed by the rush brought on by being in an incredibly beautiful city like Freiburg. Cobblestone streets, medieval architecture, Schnitzel, Spaetzle, copious amounts beer and rich regional food make this tiny town easy to love and grow attached to.

This weekend we had Intrideans at four different events we sponsored from DC to Germany, talking about user experience, design, Ruby on Rails, and tablets. Here's a quick rundown of our experience at the events.

MoDevTablet

The first event kicked off early Friday morning. We partnered with GoMoDev to support their MoDevTablet event, and Jurgen, our Managing Director of UX, Christine Nakatani, our Director of Business Development, and Maggie, one of our superbly talented Project Managers spent the day talking with tablet developers and designers.

Last April we sponsored the first MoDevUX event in Washington DC and helped facilitate some important conversations about user experience design and application development with hundreds of industry experts.

We had the opportunity to take the stage to share some of our insight gained from developing beautiful, modern mobile applications over the years. Our presentation garnered a lot of feedback and even landed us a story in InTheCapital, DC's leading online news source for tech and startups.

The Rails community has had its share of misogynistic controversy over the last several years. Dominated by male programmers (recent statistics suggest 94% of employed Rails programmers are male), the inroads to professional Rails development for females are not exactly accessible or welcoming.

Of course, it's not just the Rails community that lacks representation from women. When only 18% of the Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients in 2010 were female () it's obvious there is a lack of female participation in the entire field of programming.

We’re excited to announce our involvement and sponsorship of Smashing Conference, taking place in beautiful Freiburg, Germany September 17-19th.

This event brings together web designers and developers for three days of intense workshops and engaging presentations from design experts around the world. We’re sponsoring the sold-out event and trekking to Germany for an epic “meeting of the minds.” (And some streusel. And beer. And sausages.)

I'll be spending the last weekend of July with passionate Ruby developers and pioneers in Burlington, Vermont - a small but charming city situated on the eastern shore of sparking Lake Champlain, and the perfect spot for Vermont's first Ruby conference.

Though this is a much anticipated retreat from the commotion of New York City (which is where I've been spending the majority of my time for the last several months), it's also an exciting opportunity for me to share some of the recent work I've been doing on spatial programming and location based apps.

I arrived at Moscone Center on Wednesday the 29th to a mob of people making their way towards registration. When I finally made it to a registration table I got my badge and was off to the races.

I wandered around for a bit with the crowd until the keynote started upstairs an hour later. I was really looking forward to this, so I headed up to the third floor and found a seat. The music was good and on the screens over the stage were some of the great Google Chrome Experiments.

We're back with a debriefing on all the interesting stuff that happened at Saturday's exclusive Day of Foster.ly event.

Jurgen and Anthony poke fun of the stylus tool and talk about fostering happy development teams in this exclusive interview at MoDevUX.

Have a great idea? Do you daydream about founding a startup? Do you have the entrepreneurial spirit but don't know how to kickstart your vision?

Then join us on May 12th at the Artisphere in Arlington, Va for "A Day of Foster.ly" - an engaging event led by DC, Maryland and Virginia entrepreneurs, designed to empower startups, visionaries, innovative students and other aspiring entrepreneurs like yourself with the resources and information needed to get started and to succeed.

Last week we sponsored MoDevUX, a mobile conference in Washington, D.C. led by vanguards in the mobile development and design industry. In addition to learning about emerging trends from the diverse crowd of presenters and attendees we also shared a bit of our own "secret sauce".

Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technologies, shared the stage with Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to tackle the topic of "Development and Design: When the Two Must Act As One".

Through cultivating a culture of quality in both design and development we've gained insights on the formula for success among teams of developers and designers. MoDevUX was an opportunity for us to share those insights with the greater mobile design and development communities.

Hey RailsConf goers! You won't want to miss Jerry Cheung, co-author of the just-released MacRuby in Action book and Senior Engineer at Intridea present "Evented Ruby vs Node.js" Tuesday afternoon!

This month we're sponsoring MoDevUX and joining pioneers in mobile design and development at an event created to focus specifically on user experience and design for mobile.

Nothing beats coding amidst a backdrop of mountains with snowcapped peaks, especially when it's done alongside some of the greatest and friendliest Ruby developers in the country.

Patti and Bobby have returned from the land of "Weird" and lived to tell the tale of SXSW 2012. Read on for a thorough debriefing of their adventures in Austin with a crowd of the most notorious tech nerds in the country.

After kicking off the month of March in Austin at SXSW with Patti and Bobby and then at MountainWest RubyConf with Ted for some UXDD goodness, we're heading to, well... our backyard.

That's right, we're supporting RubyNation for the third year in a row, and this time Pete Jackson will be presenting "Geospace your Rails Apps" to a sold out crowd of more than 250 Ruby enthusiasts.

The 2 track/2 day conference kicks off this Friday at the Sheraton in Reston, Virginia. Pete takes the stage at 3:40 pm on Friday afternoon:

Ted O'Meara departs today for Salt Lake City, Utah where he'll spend the next few days immersed in the ever-evolving community of Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. He's headed for destination: MountainWest RubyConf.

Ted came to Intridea two years ago as a designer and in just a short time he's proven to be a dextrous and pioneering leader. Not only has he become an accomplished project manager, he also plunged into the development world in an effort to become a more knowledgable and powerful designer. He did it. He crossed the streams.

SXSW kicks off this week, and you'll find Intrideans Patti and Bobby in Austin for the tech event of the year!

Rails. No, really.

The future of web and mobile design is in Rails, Sinatra, Django, and other RESTful web frameworks that can be used to leverage design power across multiple platforms, making it easier and faster (translate: more economical) to design for web, mobile and desktop.

Our UI/UX team was stationed up in NYC for the Future of Web Design conference last week and we were able to chat with some really awesome folks who had innovative and inspiring ideas about web design.

November is shaping up to be one of our busiest months for events. This week our design team is in NYC for The Future of Web Design; Ted O'Meara will be in Baltimore next weekend to support Education Hack Day; Michael Bleigh just landed in NYC after presenting at Ruby Midwest, and he, along with all the Senior Partners, will be jetting off to China in two days to meet the Intridea East team in Shanghai for RubyConfChina and then to HangZhou to attend the first Intridea East retreat.

Intridea Partner and open source crusader, Michael Bleigh, will be back in his hometown of Kansas City this week, presenting "Rails is the new Rails" at Ruby Midwest.

The sweeping changes brought on by Rails 3 and 3.1 haven’t just made our existing development patterns easier, they have opened up the ability for us to build new patterns that accomplish more in a more beautiful and efficient way. In this session you will see how thinking about new features in a different light can lead to real innovation for your development practices. Examples include baking routing constraints into your models, application composition with Rack, truly modular design with the asset pipeline, and more.

This November, a crowd of pioneering programmers will gather at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore to create applications that provide solutions to teachers, students and schools.

The American Education system is a large, complex structure. It is often targeted as a system that desperately needs improvement, yet its proportion makes is seem impenetrable and unchangeable. As technology advances schools struggle to keep up. Teachers work to find ways to use technology on their own to improve their systems locally and to reach students in more modern and relevant ways.

In just a few weeks, our design team, led by Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX, will descend upon Manhattan for three days of intelligent discourse on the future of web (and mobile) design at this year's highly anticipated Future of Web Design (FOWD) event.

This year we are sponsoring this remarkable event which brings over 500 talented designers together for intimate sessions on the most current topics in web design. Top industry experts will be flown in to lead two days of informative sessions in which attendees will learn about the future of everything from HTML5, CSS3, Compass, Sass, Mobile UX, iOS design, Haml, responsive web design, content management systems, branding, animations, and JavaScript, which will be followed by a day of in-depth workshops.

Earlier this month we brought our expertise in mobile development and design to MobileUXCamp in DC. As we facilitated discussions throughout the day we were able to interact with motivated, creative mobile enthusiasts. We talked about how mobile design standards have influenced web design; we talked about our UX process, and we even delved into consulting strategies.

Several of our designers and developers spent this past weekend attending sessions on art and technology and talking to people about Intridea's methods at Betascape. The event pulled together artists and technologists from various industries and demonstrated what is happening on the bleeding edge of that intersection - from robotics to personal fabrication to data visualization.

The most popular session among the Intridea contingent was Kyle Fritz's talk, "Computers Suck, The Internet Rules: How to make networked stuff that interacts with the real world." Kyle touched on ways to virtually control your home stereo, locks, lights, and other household objects that can be remotely manipulated with just a simple working knowledge of electronics and a bit of hacking. It was a great example to our designers of how technology can be accessible and useful to them.

This weekend we'll be supporting the innovation that happens when artists and technologists collide, through our sponsorship of Betascape 2011.

Last weekend, we sponsored and presented at MobileUXCamp in DC to discuss the ways in which mobile devices are reshaping our interactions with the web. This weekend we'll be in Baltimore, supporting the incredible work that happens when artists and technologists focus their combined talents.

Inspired by their recent trip to the Wolfram Data Summit, Marc Garrett and Jurgen Altziebler share their thoughts on big data and the missing component.

The Wolfram Data Summit is an invitation-only gathering in Washington, DC which brings together the leaders of the world's largest data repositories. Professors, Chief Privacy Officers, Research Scientists, Chief Technology Officers, Data Architects, and Directors from leading organizations like UCSD, the U.S. Census Bureau, Thomson Reuters, Cornell, and Orbitz (among many others) come to present on the challenges and opportunities they face in the data community and to discuss their work.

If you follow us on Twitter you probably know by now that a significant group of Intrideans gathered together in Maryland over the weekend for an Intridea Retreat on the Chesapeake Bay. Despite being a distributed team of Rails developers and designers, most of us do see each other throughout the year as we travel to conferences, give trainings, and work onsite with clients. Even so, the retreat was the first time almost all of us were together in one place for a long weekend.

Thursday night you'll find Intridea at the annual Social Matchbox Startup Launch Event. We're joining an impressive lineup of companies to support this grand event put on by DC-area Startup Founders, Investors and Leaders that helps startups gain exposure by providing access to prominent journalists and investors while providing a competitive launch platform.

Thursday evening at 6pm we'll be at the US Navy Memorial Heritage Center to observe the startup presentations and offer our expertise to fledgling entrepreneurs. Intridea's Senior Partner and Co-Founder, David Naffis, will be available to answer questions, give advice and talk about Intridea's own successful launch strategy. If you plan to attend the event, be sure to stop by our table to say hello! We look forward to talking with you about web development, design, entrepreneurship, startups, and Ruby on Rails.

Last month Intridea sponsored RailsCamp New England - a Rails retreat in the western mountains of Maine. Adam and I attended the event for the second time (this was the fourth U.S. Rails Camp, and the second one in Maine) along with 38 other Ruby and Rails developers. On a rainy Friday evening we all settled in the cozy Maine house for a long weekend of geekery.

This year we're proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of Mobile UX Camp DC, a mobile technology themed BarCamp. The event is supported by other leading technology companies and will be attended by mobile application developers, content writers and marketers, and others that want to gain an understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in the mobile space.

Last week, I packed my bags and headed for Norfolk, VA to speak at the Mid-Atlantic Developers Expo. I've spent the better part of the past year traveling the country, speaking about Geospatial Programming using Ruby and Rails. As a long-time lover of maps, the topic has been a joy to introduce to the community of Ruby developers, at both small regional conferences like MagicRuby or MountainRuby, and at major national conferences like RubyConf 2010 and RailsConf 2011.

10gen, the purveyors of everyone's favorite document-oriented database MongoDB, recently held a gathering of developers, sysadmins, devops, and other parties interested in MongoDB in D.C. appropriately named MongoDC. I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak on how we use MongoDB here at Intridea, so I delivered a little treatise on one of our client projects. Although we've moved most of the project operations off of MongoDB now for a few reasons, working with such a deep and wide dataset was an interesting experience that a lot of people don't encounter when using document-oriented databases.