ProjectX Technology

ProjectX are in the news again. We have just featured in an article in this month’s Idealog. The article is profiling on how Wellington is helping to make the web cool again in New Zealand. Trade Me, SMH aka. Starnow and ProjectX are highlighted as some of the Wellington companies leading the new wave. The article also offers some sage commentary from Web 2.0 guru Richard McManus and O’Reilly veteran Nat Torkington.

Wellington is hotting up with start-up fever. I know of 4-5 startups that are currently in the pipeline. With Weta now scaling up in terms of people and projects (more movies, animation and games) , Wellington is a buzz with all the activity. There are going to be some good opportunities for skilled people to work on some kick ass projects.

I’ll post a link to the article once its live online.

Working for a startup is hard. You never know what’s coming around the corner. Trying to predict what will happen next is nearly impossible. It’s very easy to get caught up in this never ending simulation of “what if” scenarios. At the end of the day you find that none of those scenarios actually happened and that you ended up doing something completely unforseen.

Well, you can strategise, plan for every eventuality and worry all you want. Nothing good will come out of it because by the time you achieve your goals (if you don’t go mad first) you will be so tired (and possibly mad) that you won’t be able to enjoy it.

So what’s the answer? The answer is very simple. Plan but don’t let your plans fix your direction. Acknowledge life’s inevitable obstacles but don’t be discouraged by them. Believe in your idea but stay open to changing it. Oh, and every now and then sleep in and be late for work. It’s good for your brain and your soul.

You won’t have any less work to do if you choose to follow these deceptively simple rules but you will be more relaxed, happier and productive. And when you finally reach your destination you will be able to look back and smile as you remember your hard but pleasant journey.

Uses the Sieve of Eratosthenes technique, and the intruiging inject() method.
This returns an array of all the primes between 2 and 1000 inclusive.

(2..1000).inject((2..1000).to_a) {|res, i| res.select{|n|n==i||n%i!=0} }

As some of you may have heard the Wellington Ruby on Rails developers community (WellRailed) is organising a seminar on Ruby on Rails for complete beginners. This doesn’t mean that only beginners should come though. Everyone is welcome as you all have something to contribute, be it a simple question or an insightful answer. The seminar is jointly organised by Tomek Piatek, Tim Haines and Nahum Wild.

What: Getting started with Ruby on Rails – a community based approach
When: 6:30pm, Tuesday, 31st October 2006
Where: CreativeHQ, 25a Marion Street, Te Aro, Wellington (behind Resene Paint)
Map: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/nz/wellington/wellington+central/marion+street/25/
Presented by: Nahum Wild
Intended audience: Anyone interested in Ruby on Rails.
Prerequisites: Interest in Ruby on Rails. Knowledge of programming in any language will be useful during the live demo.
Refreshments: Hell pizza
Cost: Free. It’s a community event. It is our turn to give back.

The format will be as follows:

• Arrive between 6:30 and 7pm.
• Start at 7pm: Welcome and introduction
• Quick overview of Ruby on Rails and its main underlying design pattern: Model-View-Controller
• An end to end demonstration of how to build a simple blog application in Rails.
• Q&A time.

A traditional computer science refreshment consisting of pizza will be served during the Q&A session by our sponsors ProjectX Technology. Also, the kind folks at The Pragmatic Programmers publishing company have donated a copy of “Agile Web Development with Rails” which will go into a draw on the night. In the spirit of honouring those who taught us and helping those who come after us anyone with more than a year of Rails development experience is not eligible for this prize as you won’t need it. If you are an expert you won’t miss out though as all WellRailed members are now eligible for a 30% discount off all O’Rielly books. Come to the seminar to find out how.

This will be a popular event (how could it not be with all that pizza). Due to the limited size of the venue we can only accommodate 30 people. Please register today by sending an email to tomek.piatek@gmail.com. We will send a notification to the list to let you know how many places remain.

Please help us promote this event by telling your friends about it.

About WellRailed

We are group of software developers based in and around Wellington. We share a common passion for technology which can make our lives easier and we want to share our knowledge with other, like-minded people. We have an active mailing list. Everyone is always welcome to subscribe to the list: http://groups.google.com/group/WellRailed. Once you have subscribed you can send your posts to WellRailed@googlegroups.com . You can also access and search through the list archive on the group page http://groups.google.com/group/WellRailed.

I am a programmer therefore I am lazy. You see programmers are a peculiar bunch. We will spend hours trying to figure out how to save 5 minutes. That’s not wasteful at all. It’s called converging on a pure solution. What is wasteful is wading through hundreds of pages of documentation trying to find that thing that does the thing. You know, that thing which you can never find.

This is a list of really handy, time-saving cheat sheets:

• Prototype (the link to the PDF is after all the images)
• Ruby on Rails
• JavaScript
• Regular Expressions
• MySQL
• CSS

I especially like the Prototype cheat sheet. Prototype is vast and I always find myself re-implementing some part of it because I don’t know that it’s already been done. This cheat sheet organises the various parts of Prototype into logical units making it easy to find related information.