Full audio of the “From Freelance to Agency” panel at SXSW 2009. Download it here.
Clutterful
A web application we built to provide organized communication for you and your team.
Keep us honest.
View commit history. Track deployments.
Full audio of the “From Freelance to Agency” panel at SXSW 2009. Download it here.
Disclaimer: I do not hate Rails, wish death upon Rails, or think Rails is “stupid”.
Frameworks are awesome. They offer a developer many perks, such as greater productivity, rapid development, and improved scalability. One of the more influential frameworks in the past couple of years is Ruby on Rails. As a company, MB has used Rails in a handful of projects to varying levels of success. Recently, though, I’ve had a growing concern about the Rails community, and it’s nearing the point of frustration. Let me explain.
First, some backstory. I first heard about Rails in the summer of ‘06. At the time, I was working as a developer for a local marketing company. Most of the apps I wrote were written in PHP, and I had constructed a simple framework to assist with my job. So, I followed Rails from a distance for a few months, at times even taking what I learned from Rails and applying it to my own framework.
In 2007 I made the decision to use Rails for a personal project. This particular project was simple in nature, requiring only a small number of models and controllers. Everything was groovy; the project came to a close and functioned fine, though it was never published. In late 2007, we began taking on our first Rails clients.
Our clients came to us with a lot of complex problems. These were real-world problems, dealing with gigabytes of data spread amongst several databases, with thousands of simultaneous users requesting and manipulating massive data sets through a web interface. To make a long story short, the “Rails Way” ended up not being the best way to solve the problems we faced.
OK, enough history and on to my point. There is a number of people in the Rails community who seem to believe that the “Rails Way” is the absolute best way to develop a web application. What’s more, an entire industry has sprung up around Rails, with companies offering to turn any idea into a web application powered by Rails. More and more developers are tying themselves to this one technology and, more specifically, a single approach to web application development.
Perhaps this is a misconception on my part (if you feel it is please let me know). I simply want to challenge developers to keep thinking, continue moving forward, and not become tied to any one way of development. After all, isn’t Rails just a single step in our journey towards the better development of web applications? Let’s not think of it as our destination.
Our first iPhone application hit the app store this morning! Dubbed Mojito, our app allows you to view the latest statistics from your Mint installation. For those that don’t know, Mint is a popular web site analytics program (haveamint.com).
The app released today is the lite version, but a full version is coming. We’re in the process of developing a plugin for Mint that will feed more data to Mojito. For now, enjoy the full-functional lite version which provides three sets of statistics:
As you probably know, we submitted our first iPhone app last week. We ended up needing to make one change in how the app handles the absence of network connectivity. The app has been resubmitted and we’re waiting for approval. We hope to have another update early next week!
Check out all things Mojito at mojitoapp.com.
If all goes well, our first iPhone application will be submitted to the app store this afternoon. Details on the app will be available upon acceptance. Until then, here’s the icon (for your viewing pleasure).

Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML (mostly equivalent Internet Explorer implementation) as a base for creatinggraphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vectorart (similar to Flash) compatible cross-browser and easy.
Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.
This looks like a very cool library. We plan to put it to good use in some upcoming projects.
Mark Boulton released his book (PDF) “A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web”.
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.
Ruleby is a rule engine written in the Ruby language. It is a system for executing a set of IF-THEN statements known as production rules. These rules are matched to objects using the forward chaining Rete algorithm. Ruleby provides an internal Domain Specific Language (DSL) for building the productions that make up a Ruleby program.
FYI, if you’re in the Huntsville, AL area come hear Joe Kutner give a presentation on Ruleby at the upcoming hsv.rb meetup, taking place at BizTech on February 13th @ noon.