March 26th, 2010, by Adam
Today, The Frontier Group are proud sponsors of the Ruby Summer of Code.
“To continue Google’s great tradition of sponsoring Open Source Development via summer student interns, several Ruby companies, organizations and community members are getting together to fund Ruby Summer of Code. The project will work much the same way Google Summer of Code does — mentors and student interns, with mentors voting on which student projects get slots. Students will be paid a stipend of $5000, and we’ll raise the number of student slots as contributions come in.” – Ruby Summer of Code
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is Ruby Summer of Code?
Ruby Summer of Code is a student internship program, modeled after Google’s Summer of Code, designed to help fund student development of Ruby coding projects in Summer 2010.
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What are the goals of this program?
The goals of the program are to help get students engaged in Ruby development and the Ruby community, and to continue the tradition of great student Ruby projects completed in past summers as part of GSoC.
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How many mentoring organizations and students are expected to take part in the program?
The number of mentoring organizations depends on the number of sponsors the program receives; all funding will go towards adding more mentors and students to the program. If you or your company would be interested in helping out, contact us.
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When can I apply?
The mentor application window is March 24th to April 2nd. The student application window is April 5th to April 23rd.
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How does the program work?
The Ruby Summer of Code program is designed to help fund student development of Ruby and/or Rails projects in the summer of 2010. Accepted students will be matched up with accepted mentors and will have two months to complete their summer projects. Students will undergo a project evaluation midway through the summer (dates to be announced), and those showing suitable progress will receive 50% of their student stipend. At the close of the work window, projects will undergo final evaluations, and students who successfully completed their projects will receive the remaining 50% of their stipend.
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How do evaluations work?
Projects will be evaluated by each student’s mentor, and then reviewed by the larger mentor pool. Evaluations will be individually tailored based on the pre-determined agreed upon objectives and deliverables of each project.
More information can be found at the Ruby Summer of Code website.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG, Ruby on Rails | 2 Comments »
February 2nd, 2010, by Adam
Lately I have been left feeling slightly bemused, possibly even despondent. What about you may ask? The reaction this week to the iPad for one.
The instant it was announced, the concept of jumping on the nearest spaceship and leaving this planet behind was not far from my mind. I mean, who doesn’t love a good argument on the Internet right? But the sheer magnitude of negativity and lack of foresight was astounding. I guess there was a lot of disappointed people who expected the iPad to be something that it was never intended to be, but are we really living in an “all about me” society? More importantly, is that where we want to be?
I would never expect everyone to like such a device and nearly everyone I talk to that doesn’t use an Apple product, hates Apple products. I used to be one of those people too. I grew up with MS-DOS, Windows 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000, XP, then shifted to Linux for the next few years. Maybe a solid Apple product came along at the right time for me, just as all the other competitors were struggling. They’ve since moved on and regained their following again, but I’ll most likely continue down the path which has seen me the most productive in business and life.
But back to my original point. I spent 10 minutes thinking about potential uses for the iPad that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere, and it wasn’t hard to come up with some amazing out of the box solutions. I contemplated writing a post, to join the other millions of bloggers out there but I held back for a while. Eventually Venessa Miemis wrote exactly what I was thinking, but she’s done the hard work citing resources and everything!
If you have a spare ten minutes it’s definitely worth a read, regardless of how you feel about the device. It may turn out to be a game-changer or it may disappear into insignificance 12 months after it launches. But if like me, people want to read some objectivity on a topic, then this is for you.
iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Lifestyle | No Comments »
January 28th, 2010, by Adam
Over the last month we have been in negotiations with Engine Yard to join their Partner Network. Today we are proud to announce that we have been accepted into the program and have become Engine Yard’s first Australian Partner. The partnership is a mutually beneficial arrangement that enables us to work together on projects that require the backing of a premier scalable Ruby on Rails hosting company.
We look forward to working with Engine Yard and are excited at the opportunities it will bring in 2010.
Oh, and we get to display a sexy badge :)
From prnewswire:
With the dramatic increase in the number of Ruby on Rails development firms, Engine Yard has launched the Engine Yard Partner Network to connect customers to a full range of application services for Ruby on Rails including design, development, deployment, and maintenance. Choosing an Engine Yard Partner with Engine Yard products and services helps deliver a highly available, scalable, secure application and a seamless end-to-end experience.
“The ecosystem of application development firms using Ruby on Rails is snowballing as more and more firms discover they can get more done in less time by switching to Rails,” said Marcy Campbell, VP of Sales and Business Development of Engine Yard. “We’re excited to offer our partners a complete, reliable platform for their Rails applications during and after development.”
Partner Network developers create applications using Ruby on Rails because they can deliver better applications faster and with higher quality. They rely on Engine Yard to provide the best platform, technologies, and services to deploy and manage applications in the cloud.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG | No Comments »
January 20th, 2010, by Adam
What is Sortfolio?
Sortfolio (the website formerly known as Haystack), is a website where web design firms (and freelancers) can provide the necessary information about their business to a potential client. Instant information such as location, price and style of work are easily found. Sortfolio makes it easy for a potential client to browse multiple web designers all at once and make an informed choice.
Whether this concept will prove to be effective long term is still an unknown. Certainly for companies in Australia it seems to be less effective at the moment. I would imagine that potential customers in Australia probably aren’t using this sort of website or directory, like our American counterparts would be.
We’ve had our free listing on there since the site launched in October and have had no enquiries in that time. Potentially the 11 hits to our website from Haystack last year were all internal.
The paid plan experiment
Sortfolio offers a paid plan for $99 per month. You have access to 6 thumbnails instead of 1, and a larger listing card. Given that there can be a large number of people competing for ad space, this can prove to be effective from a theoretical point of view. You can see the immediate benefit on the Perth-Australia page.
This benefit is less apparent when the search is refined, however there still is an advantage to being a large listing card.
Recently 37 Signals announced another benefit for paid listings. They purchased a slot on The Deck Network for Sortfolio. That gives somewhere between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 ad impressions in a 30 day period. They used to run a static ad in that spot, but now are splitting the ad display 25% static and 75% dynamic. The dynamic ads feature the Sortfolio Pro customers. About 140 companies have Pro listings and the ad is a combination of a crop of the thumbnail as well as linking to the Sortfolio listing.
This means we will also get roughly 15,000 highlighted ad impressions across The Deck Network. This means exposure to sites such as Daring Fireball, A List Apart, 43 Folders, Kottke.org, The Morning News, Ze Frank, Twitteriffic (in app), Tweetie (in app) & Design Observer.
It will be interesting to see over the next 2 months whether this proves to be effective for an Australian company, as well as it seems to be for our US counterparts. You can check out our full listing on Sortfolio and if you are an Australian company (or freelancer) who has had success with Sortfolio, please leave a comment.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Inside TFG | 3 Comments »
January 10th, 2010, by Adam
JRuby is a 100% Pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. From the folks over at the JRuby project:
The JRuby project has been growing impressively quickly, with frequent releases and a constantly expanding community. There’s a hefty list of impressive users and companies, and the team has been touring the world, trying their best to make it out to everyone who wants to hear and learn about the project.
As with any growing code base though, there’s a need to keep things tidy; frequent releases and speedy development also mean bugs, and things that need fixing—and that’s where we turn to you!
The first ever official JRuby BugMash will take place this Saturday, January 9th through Tuesday, January 12th. The core team will spend the days prior to the BugMash highlighting the specific bugs that are most important—you’ll want to keep an eye out for the JRuby Introsection, which will one of the focuses of the BugMash. Also look in spec/tags for failing RubySpecs for JRuby’s 1.8 and 1.9 compatibility modes. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit (especially in 1.9) for both new and experienced developers. Then, Saturday morning, it’s off to the races! As a small token of our appreciation, in addition to the wonderful satisfaction of having made a difference to the project, we’ll be sending each of the first 100 participants a limited edition JRubyConf Poster.
The JRuby Core Team will be around on IRC channel #jruby throughout the BugMash to help folks get started and to answer questions. Be sure to stop in and say hello!
There’s also a great post on the good and bad of JRuby over at the Engine Yard blog.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment »
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