We were also fortunate to have Erik Lacson from Devex at the Proudcloud HQ as well during this edition of Proudcloud Talks. Cheers mate.

Check out Andrei’s presentation deck below.

reddotrubyconf was held on April 22 and 23, 2011, at the Singapore Management University. Being the south east asian region’s first ever Ruby conference and so close to home, Jason Torres and I joined a large group of PhRUG members and flew to Singapore.

As anticipated, the conference had a more intimate attendee size which gave everybody a high value experience as we all got the chance to meet many rubyists and rub elbows with some industry rockstars like Ruby creator Yukihiro Matz, the Pickaxe Book author Dave Thomas, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and Envylabs founder Greg Pollack.

Props go out to the organizers and their fantastic work, Jason Ong, Andy Croll, and the Pivotal Labs team led by Carl Coryell-Martin.

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matz

Awesome talks from the first day were had by all as Matz gave the ‘keynote’ and Dave Thomas explained how Ruby really evolved from the best of many languages. Ian Mcfarland of Pivotal labs gave a talk about Agile the Pivotal Way (which I swear I’ve seen more times than I really need to).

The original pragmatic programmer Dave Thomas explaining why he thinks Ruby is an amalgam of the best of other programming langauges.

That night, we all trooped to the Pigeonhole for PechaKucha where Manila based Steven Talcott-Smith gave a talk on his work-in-progress unified equation offered as a middle ground project estimation method. He places it somewhere between the from-the-hip approach and a painfully thorough story creation process.

The most energetic and (I believe) the most meaningful talk of the night was from pinoy rubyist Bryan Bibat. Bryan gave a compelling (ahem… love your own fellas) account of his continuing adventures evangelizing Ruby in a 3rd world country like the Philippines. Bryan sure made us pinoy rubyists proud that night.

Catch Bryan’s presentation with a full transcript here.

The 2nd day was a blast as well, where many speakers hurriedly rushed to creatively modify their presentations to include some not so subtle ribbing on Pivotal Labs. For some reason I can vaguely remember now, Pivotal (and their “way”) came of as a hard sell for the audience and the speakers.

The most ingenious was Greg Pollack‘s where he somehow managed to integrate a back masked message in his deck. Pivotal is Evil flashed for a split second between the back masked slides.

All tongue in cheek though.

Taking a break between talks. They had Red Bull flowing for that afternoon boost. Thanks @bridgeutopia for this snap.

The most memorable one in my book though was Tom Werner-Preston‘s presentation on git‘s innards, most particularly the intro about Github. It had a lot of slides of beer, beer on tap, and beer drinking.

That evening, they bought the beer at Uluru. Jason and I went home at 3am I think.

Tom Preston-Werner on advanced GIT techniques. Thanks for the ale Tom...

Since Github bought beers, I made sure to get some major action going on my Untappd check ins that night.

Thanks to Ed of Engineyard who bought a round of beers as well. His T-shirt says No ticket? It didn’t happen. Take heed.

Here’s a Google Doc that aggregates all the relevant RubyDotRedConf 2011 resources

Needless to say, we all had a blast and can’t wait to come back next year.  Hope to see these guys again on May 19 at the monthly PhRUG meetup.

Until then, Semper Fi, do or die.

Elements.js is a new browser based development framework coming out of Days of Thunder that uses pure HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to help you build Rich Internet Applications and games.

Lead developers on the project Jason Torres and Jopi Ardona worked hard to finish first iteration in time for Game Jam and were still coding just before we left for the event.

Jason Torres (@jasontorres) and Jopi Ardona busy hacking away at the elements.js code base just before we left for Game Jam.

The next milestone release for Elements.js should be around March and will be presented again at Roofcamp. Till then, you can play around with the current release as it progresses. Just visit the project website at www.elementsjs.com.

Gam Jam participants chow down before forming the respective teams.

Carl was introduced to us by Terence Pua, founder/CEO of insync and curator for the Manila edition of The Startup Digest.

Carl Coryell-Martin sharing the Pivotal development methodology, cerveza in hand.

A few months ago, I posted a video of Carl’s talk at Echelon 2010 on Real World Agile Development. I’ve been following Pivotal Labs for a while and am intrigued by how they’ve evolved their work methodology throughout their organization. Highlighted by pair programming, work-life-balance, and of course Test Driven Development, Agile the Pivotal Way has been borrowed and adopted by many Rails Development firms.

They’ve even publicly shared Pivotal Tracker, their SCRUM project management tool which (through a quick survey) was being used by roughly 80% of the RoR developers in attendance that night.

PHRUG listening to the talk with rapt attention

It’s no surprise then that Carl’s talk was eagerly anticipated and well received by the philippine Ruby community, which also welcomed Carl’s colleagues including Mike Mazur. (I forgot your business card at the office @amir, and no-joy on googling you so i’ll have to edit this post later

]]> http://blog.proudcloud.net/2010/12/phrug-and-pivotal-labs-at-proudcloud-hq/feed/ 0 http://blog.proudcloud.net/2010/11/proudcloud-activates-days-of-thunder/ http://blog.proudcloud.net/2010/11/proudcloud-activates-days-of-thunder/#comments Thu, 25 Nov 2010 05:37:46 +0000 Jay Fajardo http://blog.proudcloud.net/?p=568 We’re here at Proudcloud to build things, and much of our driving force comes from the ideas we brew and transforming them into awesome apps.

To make sure we don’t lose touch with the innovative spirit we feed on, we’ve designated Thursdays and Fridays as Days of Thunder, when everyone is encouraged to build out our internal projects, develop new stuff, and go into full hacking mode.

DoT was designed to put structure into our R&D efforts so that ideas we have aren’t eternally kept in the icebox waiting for “when we’ve got free time”.

For good measure, Saturdays & Sundays are there for when the hacking velocity becomes too strong to quit.

During DoT though, we never ignore client work as all our project engineers are ready to heed our clients’ urgent call.

While Proudcloud codes with Rails 3.0.0, Ruby 1.9.2RC and the latest builds of MongoDB/Mongoid, being on the edge does have its drawbacks when using hosting providers who need to play it safe with stable package releases.

When deploying Rails 3 Mongoid based apps on EY’s AppCloud, we discovered that;

• EY does not support MongoDB out of the box and requires custom chef recipes;
• You need to create a custom cluster of instances with MongoDB installed on a utility instance;
• EY’s latest installed binary of  MongoDB version is 1.4.4 while Mongoid 2.beta.17 requires >= 1.6.0.
• There’s no documentation anywhere to help you with this issue.

Getting MongoDB on Engine Yard

As a backgrounder, Engine Yard has custom recipes that will allow you to install MongoDB (and other packages) on AppCloud. The recipes can be found on github, with specific instructions for MongoDB here.

Remember though to un-comment the reference to MongoDB in cookbooks/main/recipes/default.rb.

The ridiculously simple solution: Portage

Trying to make various Mongoid versions and dependencies play well with 1.4.4 and Rails 3.0.0 failed miserably. EY support suggested we tweak the emerge recipes to retrieve the desired build and have the package installed during the EY deploy.

Jason Torres, who has a black belt in rails app deployment, thought otherwise and discovered a simpler approach.

Going into your utility instance’s shell, you’ll find the various Gentoo Portage package definitions for MongoDB in /engineyard/portage/engineyard/dev-db/mongodb-bin/. We wanted the latest MongoDB build which was 1.6.2 at the time of this writing.

The trick is to have Portage retrieve the latest MongoDB build. To do this, Jason merely copied the .ebuild definition for the latest build to another file, making sure that the target filename included the desired build version number.

When you run the emerge command, Portage determines the build version from the filename. Given this, the next step would be to simply execute emerge on the .ebuild file with the –digest parameter. This would add it to the Portage tree.

The last step would be to restart MongoDB.

note If you had not yet installed any MongoDB version on your instance, you can start instead with the Portage steps (sans MongoDB restart) and then proceed to the instructions for custom recipes.

So go ahead and get rockin’ with the latest Mongodb+Mongoid on Engine Yard.

Gavin and I drove round and round trying to find the place but finally found it after failed attempts at geolocating ourselves using the iPhone. Parking was a mess although we got a spot close enough to walk to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf without breaking a sweat.

We were late looking for the place but eventually arrived to catch the last slide of  Piotr Banasik‘s preso. I hope he shares it with us on Slideshare.

Adam Baechler welcomed us at the registration desk with free CB&T Swirl cards with load!

We got to meet a few interesting folks from the developer community who we quickly invited to Roofcamp. The collection of geeks included meetup organizers  Mike Stephenson and Mark Leduc of OutsourcingThingsDone, Ming Andrada & Vic Zapata of Webbuggers, Elmer Rivera of EXIST, and a few other guys we failed to get business cards from.

Gavin noticed a bar beside CB&T called Izumi Sake earlier so after we wrapped up our coffee laced meet-and-greet, we moved next door for some real networking over beers and chilled Sake.

After an hour or two of kampais and saluds, Gavin and I realized that we hadn’t had dinner yet. On the way home, Gavin suggested a quick run for some Mickey D’s but I told him that I’d bring him to Stackers for some real burgers. The Jack Burgers, fries, and a Coke really hit the spot!

The OTD boys invited us to a party tonight at Kuya’s but since I got home around 2:30am this morning, I’m pretty sure I’ve worn out my wife’s patience for the weekend (I even missed the Argentina-Brazil game).

Thanks fellas for a rocking meetup and the awesome convo over sake!

Now that Pivotal Labs is trying to make headway in Asia by way of Singapore, Carl Coryell-Martin evangelizes agile methods and tries to answer the issues experienced by asian dev firms facing both old school customers and coders.

In this talk Carl gave at echelon 2010, he emphasizes two things:

1. Customers can’t really scope at the start what form their application will take; and
2. Developers really don’t have the ability to establish estimates of time and cost based on a pre-determined scope of features.

Thinking otherwise, according to Carl, “will just leave you in tears.”

That location was more conducive to attendance over the Proudcloud HQ located in Libis. Looks like Roofcamp’s got a new home! Thanks to @jcmedina for helping us with the venue.

We started later than scheduled which tells us the next one should have a pre-talk window of around an hour to get the folks in and settled.

First up was Alan Magtoto and Alex Calero presenting the Digital Puppet technology they used for the movie “Dayo”. Good of them to point out that beyond the obvious entertainment application, this technology had very serious potential in child education and medical rehab.

The 2nd talk was given by Michael “Smitty” Smith, Jr., SEA Evangelist for the Yahoo Developer Network. Michael enlightened the crowd on Yahoo’s open developer platform and their keen interest in partnering with the local dev and startup community. He reminded everyone that Yahoo had a pretty hefty user base that could be exploited by app developers.

Michael "Smitty" Smith Jr. on the Yahoo Developer Network

After the talks, the crowd (composed of a healthy number of developers, angels, and VCs) had a good amount of time mingling and connecting with each other.

A Special thanks to Jack Madrid ( @jackmadrid) and Erwin Oliva ( @cyberbaguiboy)  Yahoo! for supporting the event! See you at Roofcamp #7!

Startup teams participate in Technopreneur Bootcamp

24 Tech startup hopefuls were there to listen to the expert advice of Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO) President, Dickie Gonzalez, on how to effectively pitch to venture capitalists. Dickie’s preso, combined with his in-depth breakdown of a well structured guide provided by PlugandPlay, truly enlightened the audience about the content of a good VC pitch.

Dickie Gonzalez entertains questions from one of the teams

Each startup team will only be given 4 minutes to pitch on Feb 9, something that Dickie, and Jojo Flores of PlugandPlay, repeatedly emphasized. The startups were therefore advised on how to leave essential information only in light of that small window of time.

The bootcamp was definitely a boon to the nascent philippine startup community and clears up many myths about how to present to VCs, particularly Silicon Valley based ones.

Take away quote from one of the startup teams:

Will there be local VCs on Feb 9? Talking to local VCs is like talking to bankers.

The answer was yes, but the local VCs who would be judging are valley vets savvy enough to know how to really invest in tech startups.