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.

Velocity Conf knocked my socks off. This was my first O’Reilly conference and I can really see what the hub-bub is all about. Velocity was host to many top industry pioneers like the dudes from Etsy who created StatsD, Mitchell Hashimoto who works on Vagrant, and reps from Opera, Mozilla, and Google, among other big names.

Background

As a Rails developer I normally spend most of my time on backend development, implementing features and functionalities. I am really confident about my Rails skills for backend work but rarely have I felt any happiness doing frontend work before. But things have changed since working on the new responsive intridea.com. I started some interesting frontend work from this project and fell in love with many UI skills and JS tricks, especially Pjax which I want to talk more about in this post.

I'm a huge fan of Heroku. I mean I'm a huge fan of Heroku. Their platform is much closer to exactly how I would want things to work than I ever thought I would get. However in the past few weeks Heroku has had a number of serious outages...enough to the point where I started thinking that maybe we needed to start working out a backup plan for when our various Heroku-hosted applications were down. That's when I realized a big problem, and it's not just a problem with Heroku but with any Platform-as-a-Service.

Who is old enough to ride the big kid rides at the carnival? Us! That's right, we turn 5 this month and to celebrate we're getting a facelift; you're going to love our new site! But first thing's first - a birthday toast to honor our past and celebrate our future.

In the Beginning

In the beginning there was a single idea: build a different kind of web development company. Co-founder Dave Naffis partnered with like-minded DC developers to execute on this vision and together they created Intridea, a unique and agile software design company.

The co-founders had a few ideas they kicked off with:

Creating a more beautiful web, one application at a time.

Our website has always been more than just a sales tool for displaying our services. As a web development and design company our website is our brand; it embodies the essence of who we are: our values, our culture, and our discipline.

We don't take a redesign lightly; when we approach the task of a redesign we begin with long, thoughtful discussions about our company, our image, where we're going, and what we want to communicate about ourselves to the rest of the world. Our website has to exemplify our passion for elegant and functional design, quality code, collaborative work, and our obsession with emerging technologies.