Just got back from RubyFringe in Toronto and have some serious sleep to catch up on. Pete Forde and crew at UnSpace did a fantastic job of organizing this, part tech, part culture, part revival, part cocktail party event. The photostream speaks for itself.
There were several great talks. My favorite was Damien Katz’s very personal story of cashing in his chips as a programmer @ IBM in Boston, selling the house, moving the family back home to Charlotte, NC to be nearer to family…all with any prospect of a job waiting for him. I can seriously relate to that leap and it was inspiring to hear him relate the highs and lows that a change like that entails. Damien says he knew peole worked on really cool projects and asked himself why he couldn’t be one of those people. He took the leap and made it happen - with a wife and lovely baby girl besid ehim. Apache CouchDB definitely counts as a cool project. I love that Damien admitted to not knowing how to build CouchDB when he started. But, he stuck it out and did it. Props.
There were plenty of other highlights; I’m sure the live recordings of Zed Shaw will get noticed by the Ruby/Rails community. I thought that was fun to watch but strangely self indulgent. Maybe having 3 young kids at home has developed my appreciation for childish behavior - I enjoy watching them do silly stuff too.
I just have to say I’m *really* enjoying the drama unfolding between Apple and the Canadian roll out of the iPhone with Rogers. It shines a bright light on what has been a tremendous market imbalance since the get-go. What I find interesting is that when compared against existing Blackberry plans the Rogers iPhone lineup is actually cheaper - which makes for some interesting discussions since the iPhone set are up in arms with petitions and every other kind of digital pitchfork jabbing they can imagine. Its no wonder why the Blackberry users of Canada have been so complacent - their bills mostly go to the company. Assuming the bad PR and potential market sanctions have the desires effect maybe even Rogers will hear it. And that could mean a long awaited chink in the armor.
Progress issued a press release and updated FAQ today further describing the acquisition of Mindreef. Updates include the strategic rationale and intentions for the future. Stay tuned for the webinar July 22nd for details.
As of Saturday June 28th here is what I’ve been able to collect:
As Jeff Schneider rightly mentioned Mindreef has been acquired by Progress Software. Much more information will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead. For now we’ve setup a FAQ page to handle some of the basics. I’m excited to see Mindreef in its new home and now fully to realize what a great new home it will be. Stay tuned for more details as we go.
OK This on is a serious PIMA. Why doesn’t ruby’s require involve the requiring files directory int he LOAD_PATH
1 require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + ‘/../foo‘)
You see this all the time at the top of Ruby source files? This is the Ruby Way?
I would expect to write:
and have require - try matching against the requiring files directory first, then delegate to the LOAD_PATH array.
Help me see the light.
Progress Software (NASDAQ:PRGS) announced today their intentions to acquire IONA Technologies plc (NASDAQ: ADR) for $162M. Its clear Progress is going for a SOA industry roll-up and I’m excited to see the breakout from among the non-mega platform vendors: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun.
IONA has struggled to redefine themselves in the post CORBA, SOA world and I know that isn’t for lack of technical horsepower. It will be interesting to see how Sonic/Actional + IONA develop the ESB market and how other SOA infrastructure evolves.
Just caught the TC post launching TechCrunchIT. It will be nice to have TC style energy in this space - the encumbant news sources seem so formulaic and still not quite adapted to a non-print media way of life. Subscribed.
I love Ali’s customer service framework used at Well.ca. I think customer service is a very misunderstood concept. I’m amazed how common the push back I get from people in service roles (which is EVERYONE) thinking customer service is about ass kissing - and that’s something they don’t like to do. Thinking that good customer service is somehow bowing and scraping and being subservient to your customer is doing you and your customer a disservice. To me customer service is about goal alignment
If my goals as a service provider are aligned with yours as a service consumer then good customer service is much more likely then if I view our relationship as adversarial - yet it seems that’s the normal case. How many times have you asked someone in an obvious customer service capacity a question and are greeted by blocking and avoiding tactics instead of aligned effort at resolution? This is often not the fault of the front line staff but a broken business process, with those responsible for its implementation and potentially fixing it tucked safely out of the way of reality. If you’re tired of bad service or and/or are tired of fronting for a bad business process lets start looking upstream at the business culture and management practices that make this prevalent.
So this in ancient history at this point but I’ve been sitting on a draft post for months and I need to “clear the pipes” so I’ll post it into the archives.
I attended Comunitech’s CEO Dinner last March and was hauled on stage for a lesson in humility by Marshall Goldsmith (along with Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz now of ParkVu (I hear ParkVu is hot new hansom cab startup in the area)).
The lesson of the evening was: “Do you treat your spouse as well as you treat your customers?” Well, do you?
Strangely self indulgent? That could sum up the dominate Ruby community persona