Frequent spill

I recently switched to a new job as a C# developer at cBrain. While I have respect for what they do at cBrain, the place just wasn’t for me. It would have been a great place to work for me, if I had agreed and could identify myself with their way of building software. I guess I am more of a domain model developer than a transaction script developer.

Although the place wasn’t for me, I still got a chance to learn quite a big deal, got to meet-, and got to know some extraordinary people as well. So it wasn’t all a lost cause.

So I found myself a new job. A job that has turned out to be more than I could ever hope for.

Even though I am now the oldest developer on my team (Wow! At AdPepper, they called me “the kid”) – the team has got a motivation to learn new things and to do a great job that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Beside that, we are using and are all excited about using the tools that I happen to like; we are all developing full-time on the RoR platform (although some legacy systems needs to be maintained), we are in the process of implementing true XP, and trying to use Personas to bring in User Centered Design into the process (which I wrote my master thesis on). It couldn’t be better.

I’ve been working at Benjamin for two weeks now, and I’m ecstatic. It can only be good from here…

I have worked for Ad Pepper media for the last 10 months. I’ve had a great time and some great colleagues, from whom I’ve learned much and had shared some goot times with. But now, it’s time to move on.

This means that I will be taking a long break from PHP. I would have thought the next switch would be for a full-time Rails job, but instead I got keen on the idea to come working for cBrain – a .NET based web company. Yes – you heard it right! .NET based! Besides them being some really cool guys, my new job will be giving me a chance to challenge myself in a multitude of new ways – not only with a new programming language, but also with new tasks and responsibilities.

So even though I have despised enterprise software since I first started hearing about it, I have now accepted an enterprise developer job! Why? Well, first of all, I’ve always despised enterprise development, but I haven’t really tried it. I have been riding on the anti-enterprise wave with many other fellow rails programmers, who have been engulfed by the opinionated software thoughts of Rail’s founder. I haven’t had time to actually evaluate if those opinions were right or wrong. I haven’t made my own judgements.

Even though I agree with- and can identify with the opinions underlying Rails and in particular agile programming (which my new job does not cast away), I have to find out for myself. I have to try it. Maybe I will end up the same place where I am now – being an incarnated Rails follower – but in that case, I will be much more enlightened than the vast majority of Rails people, who is and have been blind followers of the Rails mantra. I feel I need to see how it is on the other side of the fence.

And who knows, I might actually learn from it. And even better: like it!

This, however, does not mean I’m giving up on Rails. I’m working on Rails side projects now, and will be in the future as well. I don’t even have to give up my mac either!

Wow. I think I’ve been dugg – or del.icoi.us’ed! Something happened to ui-patterns.com, that from yesterday has 30 60 doubled its traffic!

Here’s a screenshot from my google analytics account:

Crazy!

The traffic is coming in from mostly del.icio.us and digg.com – but also from popurls.com and a Japanese blog

I’m stunned!

I have learned plenty by working for my current employer, Ad Pepper: both as a programmer, but also in regards to how many ways you can earn money on the internet. Delivering online ads really is a big business.

So in my quest to be better at programming in rails, I thought I might just create one of those websites that has its revenue source purely from serving ads. My criteria for the website were, that (1) it I should not use much time on developing it, that (2) I should not need to maintain it, and (3) I did not need to be proud of it!

So I set off two weekends for the project. As I did not want to maintain the site, the content should be there from the start. A theme for the site that matched this criterion was baby names! Yes! Baby names. No! I didn’t make anybody pregnant! It’s just an easy way to get data; I did not need to create the content myself.

So I used the first weekend to gather data. I first went to the Familie ministeriet to get a list of all approved names in Denmark. Then I went to U.S. Social Security Administration to collect lists of popular baby names in the U.S. All in all I ended up with more than 21.000 names. In this week, I registrered two domains: namethebaby.net and ababy.name.

The next weekend was used for programming the main site: nameTheBaby.net. It was kept in a really basic layout. As I had time to spare, I decided to make an English version of the Danish site hvadskalbarnethedde.dk also. You can find this site at: aBaby.name.

So thank you rails! I wouldn’t ever have been able to do this in PHP, C# or Java in the same time period.

As I said before, I am not particularly proud of these projects. They do what they do – and serve ads while doing it. That’s really the main purpose of the two sites. They were made more as a reaction to how my current employer makes money: an interest in seeing if I could do the same thing. The two websites might horribly fail their purpose or end up providing my with a little side-income now and then. No matter what happens, at least I can say I gave it a shot.

UI-patterns.com have actually been online for a few weeks now and traffic has started coming in. So before the site gets too popular, I thought I might announce it here first.

UI-patterns.com is my first public Ruby on Rails project to go live. It’s basically a wiki (although all wiki functionality is not available at the moment for non-registrered-users) of different kinds of documents.

The site is basically a user interface design pattern library. I am far from the first to create such a library, but as I believe I have something to offer that other libraries do not, I thought it was a good idea to create my own. The plan is continually expand the library – both with new patterns, but also with tutorial articles explaining how to implement the different patterns.

I am happy with the result and the feedback I’ve received so far – so I will absolutely continue to build on it.

Enough already – go check it out

Together with a colleague, I just launched morgenmadslisten.dk. The idea was incepted by my colleague, and the concept evolved by the both of us. He got me so convinced about the coolness about the project, that I ended up doing all of the programming. It has been fun – and even though the product we have live now is still short of things here and there, the application is already very useful.

So what is it? Well – first of all, it’s only for the Danish audience as the site is entirely in Danish. With that settled, it’s pretty much just an application that can handle recurring lists. In more concrete terms, it helps managing a tradition upholded by many Danish companies: that a new person from the company brings breakfast to everybody once a week. All employees in this way takes turns in bringing breakfast to his or her fellow employees. So how do you keep track of this? With morgenmadslisten! It will tell you who’s next on the list.

So the basics of the application is managing a rotating list. Everytime a person has had his or her turn, he or she is put in the back of the list and the next person is notified by e-mail. Pretty simple. Pretty cool.

If you’re a Dane, check it out!

Today, we launched the motigo calendar over on motigo.com. As I have been the primary developer on the project (which took only two weeks plus another week that was spent on bug fixing, adding 5 languages, and other smaller corrections) I am proud of my little baby.

The motigo calendar is the first service that we develop ourselves, and the first service to launch after motigo.com first saw the world in April 2007.

In the short amount of time we’ve have had to develop the product, I have focused on laying down strictly defined constraints for what the product should do and implicitly what it should not do. I believe the outcome has been extremely positive given the short amount of time used for developing it. The product is far from bloated, but has its focus on a few very cool features. Among these are javascript / AJAX calendar views, import of RSS feeds (did I say feed aggregator?), and small embed-able versions of the calendar for the webmaster to plug into his existing design.

As much as it has been a pleasure to develop the back-end for the product itself, as much please has it been to dive into the world of javascript. I had no clue how dynamic the language was before I started working on the motigo calendar. Almost like being back in Ruby land… and then not really.

Enough talk… go check the newly launched calendar out at motigo.com.

I just came across these two cartogram maps that show the world’s countries in distorted in size representing two different statistics: military spending and war and death. Both per capita.

Military Spending

War and death

The comparison of the two pictures conveys a very powerful message in itself, why I will refrain from commenting any furhter and leave the intrepretation up to you.

Via Daily mail

It has been more than a few months since I wrote a post in this blog. I am about to change that lousy habit. My lack of writing does not have its roots in lack of events. The last half year has been more hectic for me than any other half year has been.

I’ve been spending my time finishing up my mater’s thesis that I write in cooperation with Microsoft. Due to an NDA, I cannot tell you what the contents of the paper is, but only that it’s about using the UCD tool called personas in larger organizations. Except from that, the only thing I can say is that I’ve spent the last year (since January 2006) gathering data for the paper, and the last 6 months writing it. I finished it up a few weeks ago, and is now awaiting review comments from my Microsoft superviser and my counselor at CBS. The project is two months late, but I guess most master thesises are in Denmark. I’ll turn in the paper sometime next week – and a month after this, I’ll have a master’s degree in Computer Science and Business Administration – a cand.merc.dat.

Things have not gotten to be less hectic as I started my first ever full-time work as a web developer for AdPepper. AdPepper is one of those old-time internet companies that actually make money! They sell banner advertisement and have some pretty unique and sweet products, which I’m sure that I’ll talk about at some later time. I’ve been hired to be a part of the yet unnamed development team, which product’s site will launch on March 5th, 2007 – at least that is the plan.

So now that we’re all up to date, I’ll stop this post here and end it with a: “I’m back”... with a promise of more posts in the future.

After two years of subscribing to the 3G telephony company 3, I finally made the move to quit the subscription in order to move to a company that provided better coverage and lower pricing.

Today, around 14 days after I annulled my subscription with 3, I got a letter with the title “Are you completely sure?”. Below they gave me an offer with the same price of telephony (70 øre pr minute) and an even cheaper price for SMS messages (15 øre pr SMS) as before – and no subscription fee. Jurks! Why didn’t they just give me that offer to begin with as with me having to quit?

I decided to quit anyways as I’ve been annoyed with the company for a while, but if any of you guys are using 3 as their mobile phone operator, then try to quit or at least threaten to quit. It sure helps bringing the price down.