ProjectX Blog

If you are a Git user and deploying using Capistrano, you might be interested in this article from GitHub:

Deployment Script Spring Cleaning

(more…)

Rails 3 is a rewrite / merger with Merb, and includes Yehuda Katz, Merb lead developer working on it full-time. Here are some posts which were published recently:

http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/7/30/community-highlights-yehuda-katz

http://yehudakatz.com/2009/03/06/alias_method_chain-in-models/

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/6-steps-to-refactoring-rails-for-mere-mortals/

There are lots of lessons and techniques in ruby, rails and general programming to be learnt from these posts. Enjoy!

ProjectX has always a keen supporter of Summer of Code. Among the many aims of Summer of Code is help IT students upskill. Recently, I did a workshop for students to learn and get their hands dirty with version control software (git).

Git with it’s popularity and simple operations was the best choice I found for teaching beginners. The workshop files are posted on the Summer of Code blog (http://blog.summerofcode.co.nz/2009/07/31/code-management-git-workshop/)

This post was cross-posted at Thong’s personal blog as well.

We at ZoomIn joined the internet blackout last week, along with many others.

The recent news of the delay of Section 92A is good news. We have now removed our “dark maps” as the black out has ended. Thank you all for your comments as well as participation in the blackout.

Steve Sounders has put up the test for his stanford class on website optimisation.

There are some really challenging questions in there.

Why were ETags introduced in HTTP/1.1?
What are four techniques for reducing cookie weight?
List five techniques for making selector matching faster.
Why do ETags (with the default Apache and IIS syntax) degrade performance with regard
to proxy caching?

Kudos to Steve for pushing the boundaries of our field. Its time that optimisation was baked in by default and every web developer knew the fundamentals! That starts by teaching the students of the future.

ProjectX is heavily involved with Summer of Code and we’ve just release a number of videos on blip tv

The videos are featuring:
John Clegg – Ready, Set Code
Peter Watling – Introduction to iPhone development
Douglas Talbot – Introduction to Agile Programming
Nat Torkington – Somthing I wish people had told me…

Here’s  five reasons on why Smaps rocked our world –

1. Smaps was designed to be simple and intuitive.
2. Smaps is blazzingly fast. We worked really really hard at making the predictive search fast and it paid off.
3. Smaps was built to scale. The site has been running off only a few servers and managed to handle peak traffic of over 65K users in one day. (This happened on the day Smaps was mentioned in the Trade Me newsletter.)
4. Smaps was built on an open source stack – ruby on rails, postgres, apache / lighttpd running on windows and later ubuntu.
5. Trade Me backed a small team – ProjectX and we prove together could build world class technology from Wellington.

The ProjectX team have been busy bees… We’ve been working on the Made from New Zealand project. Its launching soon…

Want to know more ??? Be watching NZ TV any channel at 8:20pm – all will be revealed.

We’re helping take New Zealand to the World!

Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of the Yahoo exceptional performance team have built a image optimisation tool. Its amazingly easy to run.

1 Install the firefox plugin and press on the little face on the bottom of the browser.

2 Smushit will open a new tab and run the optimisation  process on the fly.

3 Download the optimised images in a zip file!

Here’s the result summary

And here’s the image optimisation report





A quick review of some of the tops NZ sites.

Trade Me could save 8K
TV3 could save 9k
Stuff could save 49K

Now there’s no excuse for having bloated images. Every web developer should have this plugin installed !

We’re delighted to announce that ProjectX is now officially a Google Maps Enterprise reseller in New Zealand. We working with a number of high profile companies to integrate Google Maps into their websites.

If you want to know anything about the different licensing models ie. Free, Premiere or Enterprise for  Google Maps. Please contact us and we’d be happy to help you with your requirements.

We’re also, partners with Zawadski Ltd who are Google Apps Enterprise specialists.